Welcome back to this tour through G. I. Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson.
In this chapter, entitled Beelzebub’s flight to the planet Earth for the fifth time, we find our three-brained leading protagonist continuing to explain to his grandson, Hassein, about the psycho-spiritual anomalies of the (also three-brained but nowhere near as developed as Beelzebub) inhabitants of planet Earth. That’s us lot.
Beelzebub starts off by telling Hassein that quite some time passed after he returned from his fourth visit to Earth, during which period humankind had spread to just about every corner of the globe and continued to practise internecine warfare. We must be talking in millennia, here, as Beelzebub explains that some of the countries and places he had visited during earlier trips – such as Tikliamish (modern Uzbekistan/Turkmenistan area) and Maralpleicie (modern Gobi Desert area) – no longer existed, having been wiped away by ferocious winds whipped up by some sort of gravitational anomaly caused by the Moon, which heavenly body, we recall, had been smashed from the nascent Earth along with a another fragment, Anulios, by the rogue comet Kondor. This latest great catastrophe to affect our planet – the third according to Beelzebub – was down to the Moon attempting to settle into a steady orbit around the Earth as per standard and harmonious universal Laws of motion (and this bit is also probably an allegory for the need to harmonise our three centres – represented here by Earth, The Moon, and Anulios – and the temporary chaos and inner change we may feel as a result of the energy generated by the effort to reconcile ourselves).
Anyway, the savage winds were so powerful that they eroded away the higher ground and filled in the natural geographical depressions in which places like Tikliamish and Maralpleicie had been located, covering those centres with sand. The massive sand storms were also responsible, says Beelzebub, for creating deserts in parts of what is modern-day India, forming the Sahara Desert on the African continent, and covering over many other smaller countries and islands. The result of all this was a huge displacement and migration of peoples, something that Beelzebub sneers at modern academics for calling the ‘Great-transmigration-of-races’, and the real cause for which, he says, not one of their theories comes anywhere near explaining.
According to Beelzebub, as soon as places like Tikliamish and Maralpleicie began filling up with sand, their inhabitants relocated to what they hoped would be places less affected by the phenomenon. Most people from Tikliamish (Uzbekistan/Turmenistan) migrated southwards to Persia (mostly modern Iran) while the remainder moved north to regions that later became known as ‘Kirkistcheri’. As for the population of Maralpleicie, some migrated eastwards and settled in modern day China, while others, the greater part, migrated westwards and eventually ended up in Europe. The inhabitants of the areas of Central Africa worst affected by the sand hurricanes, dispersed over the whole of the rest of that continent. And it was to an Earth sporting all these newly redistributed communities that Beelzebub returned for his fifth visit.
Whereas Beelzebub’s previous visits to Earth had been driven by, firstly, a mission to curb the practice of animal sacrifice (which was causing knock-on cosmic interference), and, after that had been sorted, an expedition to capture some apes for off-world analysis, this fifth time, it was a personal need to understand humankind’s proclivity for wilfully enacted internecine warfare – an activity unheard of amongst the other, much more sensible and responsible three-brained species of the Universe. Beelzebub also wanted to explore the seeming knock-on effect of that warfare; that is, the concomitant shortening of the natural human lifespan. Using his hugely powerful Teskooano, Beelzebub had been able to track humanity over a long period of time and he’d deduced that our lifespans were decreasing at a steady and determinable rate. And at this point, Gurdjieff, through Beelzebub, says something extremely interesting.
Apparently, we three-brained humans originally enjoyed lifespans of between twelve and fifteen centuries. Now, although that, in itself, is quite gob-smacking, it is what Beelzebub says about why that figure shrank that, in my opinion, needs more attention. Because he implies that our modern lifespans of between 70 and 90 years (the average shortened by factors such as wars, pandemics, and so forth) are not sufficient to ‘exist normally’ up to what Gurdjieff calls the Sacred Rascooarno. Now, the Sacred Rascooarno is death, but the inference, here, is that there are different types of death. I’ve talked, in previous postings, about the different things that may occur at physical death, depending on how much work we’ve done upon ourselves while alive, but here we have another consideration, and it is probably one Gurdjieff has inserted in order to inject a mood of urgency into getting us to pull our fingers out. We used to have between twelve and fifteen hundred years to get our psycho-spiritual acts together; nowadays we only have between seven and nine decades. Time to shift our backsides into gear then!
Anyway, Beelzebub decided to take some time out to journey to Earth on his spaceship Occasion to find the answers to two burning questions: (1) What was this constant warfare all about, and (2) What were the reasons behind the steady attenuation of the human lifespan? So, off he took from Mars and, this time, having moored his ship on the Persian Gulf, he headed inland and upriver to the then global ‘Centre-of-Culture’, the city of Babylon. If modern archaeology is anything to go by (a phrase that would probably have dear old Gurdjieff spinning in his grave) and considering the background Beelzebub gives as the chapter unfolds, we are probably talking chronologically, here, about Babylon in its second heyday under Persian rule around the period after 539 BC.
Beelzebub’s arrival in Babylon coincided, he says, with a time when something was about to occur that would eventually prove to be the primary reason that humanity would lose its instinctive inclination towards the three ‘being-impulses’ fundamental to the psycho-spiritual make-up of a properly functioning three-brained being; namely, ‘Faith’, ‘Hope’, and ‘Love’. Now, Gurdjieff capitalises those three qualities and surrounds each with parentheses (as I’ve reproduced them here) so we’d better prick up our ears and take note. The fact that there are three of them should ring alarm bells for starters, as each of those qualities corresponds to something that could be argued to relate one of the three strands/centres of the Okidanokh. Faith, we could argue, is an exercise of the intellect, Hope, very much one that involves emotion, and Love is one that most impacts the physical side of things, both in its corporeal expression and its physical impact on us when everything turns sour. I think you could also argue that the three terms are an expression of the Law of Threes in motion, because Hope and Faith (when stripped of its religious connotation) are, so to speak, flavourless energies – although ‘polarised’ one to the other in the sense that Faith implies a positive commitment to something whereas Hope is more wishful thinking – but when you add Love . . . ahhh . . . then you have something powerful. Love is the element in this Law of Threes that has the power to transform the other two – Faith and Hope – and combine them with itself into something new and very, very potent. It takes an intellectual exercise (Faith) and emotional impulse (Hope) and lifts them to a whole new level.
Before getting onto what the ‘something about to occur in Babylon’ was that would erect such a roadblock on humanity’s path to achieving a normal three-brained species’ true psycho-spiritual potential, Beelzebub digresses to criticise the label ‘learned’ when applied to those humans to whom other humans look up as knowledgeable and wise. Such people are, he insists, far from ‘learned’. All they do is obtain their so-called ‘knowledge’ by rote-learning all sorts of vacuous rubbish. His point is that humanity all too often accepts ‘knowledge’ as gospel without employing its own Objective Reason to both verify and ‘sense’ whether what it is being taught actually stacks up.
So, having rubbished these ‘learned’ individuals, Beelzebub goes on to explain to his grandson, Hassein, that, at the time of his visit, Babylon was stacked to the rafters with such men as there was some sort of conclave going on.
The conclave, says Beelzebub, came about through the actions of the Persian king under whose sway Babylon, at that time, was. Now, said king had a couple of quirks. The first was one shared by just about everyone else on the planet, namely the belief that the more gold you possess, the happier you will be (and that belief’s sister-consequence that if you have no gold yourself, you will become envious of anyone who does). The Persian king’s second quirk, though, was much more idiosyncratic because, after successful military campaigns against other nations, rather than carrying off the defeated people’s womenfolk and treasures, he left everything intact and only took captive the conquered land’s ‘learned’ men. Why? Well, you’ve probably put two and two together already. The Persian king was desperate to acquire the secret of turning base metals into gold!
According to Beelzebub, the whole thing had started back when Tikliamish still existed. In a town there called Chiklaral, some bloke called Harnahoom (who apparently never managed to coat any of his higher-being bodies, so was therefore pretty much a waste of the Multiverse’s time and energy) put it about that the transmutation of base metal into gold was possible, but – and it was a big but – to do it, you had to know just one small ‘secret’. That one episode, says Beelzebub, was responsible for the bastardisation of the genuine and hugely important science of Alchemy into a dead-end goose chase fuelled by human greed.
After the Persian king who ruled Babylon learnt that such a process existed and being at that time in need of a lot of gold for one of his schemes, he reasoned that, as the so-called ‘Learned’ already knew everything that there was to know, one of them at least must know the ‘secret’ to which Harnahoom had referred. The king started with his own subjects, but when not one of his own ‘learned’ men could come up with the information he sought – even after ‘interrogation’ in case they were hiding it from him – he spread the net wider and invaded other countries so that he could subjugate and interrogate their learned men.
The next short passage is fascinating because it is both a seeming digression from Beelzebub’s tale about what happened in Babylon and a highly unsettling piece of information about a certain ‘process’ necessary for the correct and proper functioning of the Universal Machine. In it, Gurdjieff seems to imply that, in the area and era in which the events he is describing were happening, the human birth-rate had accelerated to the point where it kind of tripped a cosmic switch (which Beelzebub calls the foreseeing adaptation of Great Nature) whereby the greater balance of the whole could only be recalibrated by the energy released from increased numbers of human deaths. Say what?! Now, I don’t know about you, but that bit made me feel very uncomfortable because it would infer that human wars of mutual destruction (along with, I presume, pandemics, natural disasters and so on) can play a deterministic role in how the All and Everything works.
Now, this is a fascinating concept and it’s one that Beelzebub will expound on later in the work, but at this point Hassein breaks in on his grandfather’s digression to ask how just one particular area of the planet could affect such a huge cosmic process, but he is told he’ll have to wait until more on that subject has been explained to him. And so, I’m afraid, must we; but I guess we can speculate that, at least on the microcosmic level, what is going on here is the veiled inference that, where it concerns a human, a single aspect of our individual make-up can, if it gets out of wonk, have an unbalancing effect on the whole organism, and that only by addressing that one aspect and making it work in concert with everything else, can we rebalance the whole person. The concept can, of course, be extrapolated outwards – the good old As Above So Below principle – to the All and Everything, but, for now, we’ll just have to wait until later to find out more.
So, Beelzebub returns to his tale of the Persian king’s quest for what we might call The Philosopher’s Stone. Having already dragged off the ‘learned’ men from half of Asia to Babylon, he set his sights on Egypt because he’d heard that the wise men of that land held onto more so-called ‘secrets’ than anywhere else on the planet. Amongst those men that the king carried off to Babylon from Egypt were certain priests who were descendants of the learned society Akhaldan that we’ve met in previous chapters.
Anyway, it transpires that the king, obviously getting nowhere with his quest for the fabled ‘secret’, eventually moved onto a new obsession which seems to have been conquest and destruction for conquest and destruction’s sake, and he basically left all the learned-men-in-exile to mooch around Babylon and amuse themselves as best they could. Left to their own devices, they soon got into the habit of holding meetings in which they discussed so-called ‘burning’ questions which, Beelzebub says, they had absolutely no chance of ever answering properly and from which nothing of any use to anybody ever eventuated. Finally, though, they got around to asking the question in which, it turned out, just about everyone was interested: that is, do humans possess a ‘Soul’?
Prior to Beelzebub’s arrival, he says, the people of Babylon were fixated on this problem, many to the point where they had lost, or were losing, their sanity over it. It had even got to the point where some of the ‘catchier’ theories were attracting their own dedicated factions. Ultimately, though, in Beelzebub’s opinion, all the different opinions and theories fell into one of two opposing and mutually contradictory camps: the Atheists, who declared that humans had no soul, and the Idealists – or Dualists – who insisted that they did. The Idealists, of course, then schismed into a myriad sub-theories about what exactly it was that might happen to the soul after physical death.
Beelzebub applies a term to the whole existential mess that was, at the time, so agitating the people of Babylon. He calls it The-Building-of-the-Tower-of-Babel. We’ll get onto why he applies that label later in the chapter but, for now, he explains that the phrase The-Tower-of-Babel – with which we are all so familiar – is an example of no true knowledge of past events – or the true circumstances that shaped them – ever passing accurately down the generations, with the result that we humans all walk around with our heads filled with ‘psychic picturings’ or, to use another term: ‘fantasies’.
So, back to his tale, and Beelzebub tells Hassein that, after arriving in Babylon, he began associating with its ‘learned’ beings, including one named Hamolinadir, an Assyrian, whose facility for Object Reason was less impaired than most of his peers, and in whom Beelzebub therefore saw some potential. Hamolinadir had studied at the planet’s then ‘highest’ centre of learning which was located in Egypt and called The School of Materialising-Thought. Beelzebub goes on to describe Hamolinadir as already possessing his ‘I’ and this is a very important point in the whole narrative because Beelzebub then explains what that term – the ‘I’ – means.
Now, there are as many different philosophies – and religions – out there as there are explanations of what this ‘I’, to which Gurdjieff alludes here, actually is. Each of them puts its own spin on the concept and many nuance the whole thing so heavily that you’d be hard put to understand what on earth they’re going on about at all. So, I’m going to stick with the way that Gurdjieff introduces us to it through the mouth of Beelzebub, and, in this instance, what he is describing as Hamolinadir’s ‘I’ is the pyscho-spiritual state he has managed to develop in his ‘waking-passive-state’ (i.e. when he is awake and interacting with others) in which he has sufficiently stabilised and balanced his three strands of the okidanokh (his three centres: intellectual, emotional, and physical/motor) to be capable of self-consciousness, impartiality, sincerity, sensibility of perception, and alertness, amongst other attributes that point to a three-brained being behaving – as much as a human on the benighted Earth can – as it should. Simply put, Hamolinadir was a human who was on the right track. Gurdjieff will go on to develop this concept as the chapters in the work progress.
Back to the narrative, then, and Beelzebub tells of how he would accompany his new mate, Hamolinadir, to meetings of Babylon’s ‘learned’ societies and listen to what they had to say about the nature of the human soul. But he soon realised that the relatively rationally minded Hamolinadir had a bit of a problem. His problem was that he actually bothered listening to the arguments and theories of both camps on the nature of the soul – Atheistic and Dualistic – and, to his inner horror, found them both utterly logical, plausible and convincing.
Beelzebub puts Hamolinadir’s plight down to the ability of the manufacturers of each side of the argument to work out what it was that their audience wanted to hear and would respond best to (a bit like modern advertisers and marketers, then) and come up with some old toot or other that they would find it difficult – or even impossible – to argue against. Those cunning arguments were made all the more convincing, says Beelzebub, because humans feel instinctively drawn to anything that pertains to Cosmic Truths (the ‘beyond’, the paranormal, other-worldly matters, call it what you like) and, because we are not equipped with the truly Objective Reason to sort the wheat from the chaff, we are prepared to accept any old codswallop that sounds even remotely believable.
Seven months after Beelzebub’s arrival in Babylon (which is probably significant, but I’m not yet sure why) poor old Hamolinadir found himself at some kind of ‘learned’ citizens conference (the king, by this stage, had lost all interest in what these guys knew or were up to) with his brain fizzing and popping and doing whirly-gigs, and not knowing what the hell to believe in. And to make matters worse, he was scheduled to give a talk. Oh no!
Hamolinadir entitled his lecture the ‘Instability-of-Human-Reason’. He started off reasonably enough with an attempt at explaining the structure of the human brain and its manner of acquiring information through what sounds like some form of collective consensus with others. Then, it seems, the poor chap began to lose the plot and, in rising hysteria, proceeded to demonstrate – quite convincingly, says Beelzebub – that man’s so-called ‘Reason’ is, in fact, nothing of the sort; rather it is incredibly fickle and impressionable and able to be convinced of just about anything. Hamolinadir began to sob, but what he next came out with is very, very important, because he begins to talk about ‘shocks’.
Now, we’ve encountered these ‘shocks’ before. They are the emotional, physical, or intellectual jolts that nudge us out of a rut and into a different way of feeling, acting, or thinking. The ‘shocks’ can be deliberately or unintentionally administered, sometimes by another person (a guru, the author of a book or movie, even a chance remark from a stranger), sometimes by changing circumstances (the loss of a loved one, a car accident, a promotion at work), whatever; but the point is that you become, to all intents and purposes, and to some degree, a different person due to the result of having undergone that ‘shock’.
Gurdjieff has a lot more to say about ‘shocks’ later in the work, but, for now, it is enough to understand that humans are susceptible to being ‘shocked’ out of (or indeed, into, if you put the reverse perspective on it) a certain way of feeling and thinking about the world around them. I’ll just add, at this point, that the ideal state to be in is one where you have achieved such a well-honed balance between your three centres, that no shock to any one of the three is capable of affecting your overall balance and Reason without your own active consent. And that’s not just Gurdjieff’s thinking – the concept can be found all over philosophical, religious, and esoteric writings – the fortress-like mindset of the Sapiens of Stoic philosophy is one notable example.
I suppose I’d also better mention, here, that these ‘shocks’ can’t be thought of as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in and of themselves, rather it is the effect they produce in any given human that matters. The exact same jolt that stimulates one person into conducting themselves as a better human being might equally stimulate another into doing something unspeakably evil. It would all depend on the individual’s state of pyscho-spiritual advancement at the time the ‘shock’ occurs.
It’s also worthwhile, I feel, to consider the following: random shocks, the ones that occur wherever and whenever – the sudden loss of a loved one, for instance – are those over which no party involved (giving or receiving) has any real control. Where it concerns deliberate shocks, however; that is, those that are calculated and targeted, then the intent behind them becomes a major consideration. So, I guess what I’m saying, here, is that, whereas a ‘shock’ applied by a well-meaning party (such as a guru) can have a positive effect, that exact same ‘shock’ when delivered with a less benign intent by a less benign party, can be a deliberate seeding of mischief or confusion. And the effects of the latter, is exactly what poor old Hamolinadir was experiencing at the time he delivered his lecture in Babylon.
Hamolinadir, it seems, had fallen victim to what we today call ‘spin-doctors’. These were the guys who championed the various conflicting ‘truths’ of what happens to the human soul after physical death, and they all fully understood – and were masters of – the verbal tricks and emotional trapdoors necessary to ensnare the gullibility of their chosen audience. In other words, these people were masters of rhetoric – the TV advertisement writers and authors of political speeches in today’s world. Of course, there may have been some amongst Babylon’s ‘learned’ men who were able to see through all the hype and verbiage, but Gurdjieff’s point here is that Hamolinadir is representative of the vast majority of humanity, in that he does not have entrenched enough Objective Reason to sift through all the options and then come to his own realisation of the Truth of the matter (if, indeed, one even exists). Actually, Hamolinadir is more than just a ‘representative’ of the vast majority of humanity. He has studied at humanity’s top school of the time, he is steeped in learning; and yet he still cannot reach beyond the blanket of theoretical white noise and discern the truth, if any, that lies behind it. And that is Gurdjieff painting a picture of just how far off the mark humanity, in its current state, is. If even a well-educated, sympathetic, three-brained human like Hamolinadir doesn’t possess the psycho-spiritual nous to objectively make up his own mind on the matter, then what chance do the rest of us stand?
To his credit, though, Hamolinadir comprehends that his Reason is flawed (which is more than can be said for most of us). He understands that something is wrong and goes on to explain the allegory behind the term that has come down to us today as ‘The Tower of Babel’. The ‘quest’ to ascend to heaven and see for ourselves what the great mystery beyond death might be is the formulation of the question itself of what happens to us when we die. The ’bricks’ from which the ‘tower’ is constructed are the different theories and variations of theories. The strength of the material from which each brick/theory is made (iron, wood, dough, eiderdown) reflects its credibility-quotient. Such a concept as this ‘Tower of Babel’, says Hamolinadir, can never hold any structural integrity and will inevitably crumble, wiping away everything beneath it. And if that’s not a metaphor for the formation, subsequent schisms, and ultimate collapse with concomitant collateral damage that religion – any religion – undergoes, then I don’t know what is. And we can stretch the metaphor still further because Babylon, so Beelzebub tells us, was, at that time, the centre of the world. So, this is a passage not just about religion and the question of the soul’s survival after death, it is a passage about the frailty, inconsequence, and ultimate futility of all human attempts to understand the nature of the Multiverse when – and this is the important bit – those attempts are made by employing only half-arsed Reason.
Hamolinadir, it would seem, was so filled with hopelessness at humanity’s plight that he opted out of the whole thing by running off to Nineveh, abandoning ‘science’ completely and spending the rest of his days as a maize farmer.
Beelzebub says that the inhabitants of Babylon were quite taken aback by Hamolinadir’s little tantrum, and one consequence of their subsequent discussions was that the phrase ‘Tower of Babel’ (which Hamolinadir had used during his speech) passed on down the generations until future humans believed it to have been an actual edifice, whose destruction resulted in mankind’s ‘universal’ language being sundered into lots of different tongues. In reality, of course, Hamolinadir had simply been talking about humanity’s aspiration to learn what happens after death; and the splitting off of multiple tongues incomprehensible to one another was nothing more than a metaphor for the multiple religions, sects, and theories – all mutually incompatible – that resulted from a quest born in ignorance and destined to failure because we simply didn’t have the pyscho-spiritual equipment or maturity to go about asking the question the right way.
In a way, I suppose, Gurdjieff has also lobbed the example of the Tower of Babel in here as a reminder that there are many things around us that have come down from ages past, in which there is a higher ‘message’ which we can discern if we know how. They don’t have to be stories – they can be the lines of a temple, a sacred dance learned by rote, a piece of music, amongst other things – but the point is that there is a deeper understanding of the Multiverse out there, encoded in many seemingly everyday things, that is accessible for those with eyes to see or with ears to hear.
Anyway, Beelzebub continues with his tale and explains to Hassein that this question of the soul’s immortality (or not) began to engross us poor, already so-confused three-brained humans even more, and he explains – for Hassein’s sake – the major differences between the two main – and totally polarised – factions: the Dualists and the Atheists.
The Dualists maintained that every human was born with a coarse physical body and an invisible soul made from finer material. The soul, they asserted, never died but – and it was a big but – had to carry the consequences (good or bad) of every action performed by the physical body during life. To make things even more difficult for this already complicated set-up, every human was born with an evil spirit on their left shoulder and a good spirit on their right, each of which was tasked with steering their human to either bad or good behaviour respectively, and everything was recorded in the relevant entity’s notebook. Upon physical death, the human soul was transported to Heaven by the two beings to a ‘panel’ presided over by God who was attended by a cohort of angels to his right, and a cohort of devils to his left. The notebooks were then placed on either side of the scales and whichever side was heaviest was the cohort that took the human soul away to its respective domain: heaven or hell.
The Dualists depicted Paradise as a place where – rather counter-intuitively – the soul could indulge itself in an abundance of the delights with which a corporeal human body would be happy: magnificent fruits, beautifully scented flowers, lovely music – in short, everything that would satisfy the physical senses. And that concept, says, Beelzebub, is so very, very wrong (criminal is the word he uses) because we are not just a collection of senses. It is overindulgence of the senses that has caused half of mankind’s problems in the first place. We have other parts – there are, after all, three strands of the Okidanokh – that must be brought into concert.
So, having rubbished the Dualists depiction of Paradise, Beelzebub moves onto their portrayal of Hell. That place, according to them, contains everything our imaginations have been led to believe it does: a burning, arid desert, filled with screams of suffering and abuse. In fact, the prospect of ending up in this forsaken place instilled so much fear in a human who was still alive that the ‘angel’ sitting on a man’s right shoulder would use it as a goad for doing good deeds in life (and I think we’ve all encountered that tactic during our childhoods, haven’t we?).
At this point, Gurdjieff drills down a level, because Beelzebub is asked by Hassein how the beings sitting on a human’s shoulders (and, therefore, presumably, the human itself) can discriminate between doing something good and doing something bad. And right here, Beelzebub does one of those little gestures – a ‘strange look’ and a head shake – which means we are getting into the nitty-gritty of something; so, we’d better sit up and take notice.
There are today, and have always existed, Beelzebub replies to his grandson, two independent and unrelated theories on what should be considered ‘good’ and what ‘bad’ on the planet Earth.
The first of these is an understanding arrived at by so-called ‘initiates’ such as those from the society Akhaldan (which we’ve met before in this series) and other subsequent schools that have produced three-brained beings capable of thinking for themselves. This ‘understanding’ boils down to a simple formula, my interpretation of which is as follows: Any action not born of conscience is bad. Any action that is born of conscience can be considered good unless that action results in personal remorse.
The second understanding of what constitutes good or bad, originates from King Konuzion and comes under the umbrella of ‘morality’ (we’ve met King Konuzion before – in the chapter The Third Descent to Earth – he was the one who invented a fake religion in an attempt to put the brakes on a runaway opium frenzy in his land of Gob).’Morality’ though, as Beelzebub wryly points out, has much in common with the chameleon, in that it is capable of changing its hue, dependent on whim and circumstance.
That’s where the mini digression on good vs. bad ends, and Beelzebub turns to telling Hassein about the alternative theory on the fate of the soul that has plagued humanity down the ages, that of Atheism. This school held simply that there is no God, no soul, and any claim to the contrary is symptomatic of barking madness. One particular strand of Atheism that became very popular as the ages passed argued that cause and effect were a perfectly natural mechanism that unfolded as the aeons passed – a kind of sequential non-spiritual karma if you like – that operates on all levels; so humanity, for instance, is simply a single link in a long chain, and was formed as a consequence of the links that came before and is therefore part of the cause for the links that will come after. The very same explanation from these Atheists, says Beelzebub, was employed to explain away any kind of supernatural phenomena.
Now, interestingly, Beelzebub doesn’t totally knock the atheists’ explanation of how the universe works. Instead he hints that there may be something in their reasoning that the All and Everything operates according to ‘mechanical’ – or fixed – laws, but he qualifies that by adding that humanity, in its current state, is by no means equipped with an objective enough Reason to fully get how those ‘Mechanical’ Laws work. All humanity is currently capable of, he says, is basing its interpretation of them on outside impressions rather than, as it should, by using its own Reason. Basically, he is saying that we humans are, at this point in our development, reactionary creatures unable to think our way out of a brown paper bag.
The upshot of all this discussion and theory-development was that the ‘learned’ men of Babylon eventually dispersed back to their own lands, where the new ‘teachings’ were rapidly disseminated and took root across the known world. Beelzebub says that process was the catalyst that rang the final death-knell for the teachings of the ‘Very Saintly Ashiata Shiemash’ whom we met way back in the first instalment of this series. This was the individual, sent by the Maker Creator Endlessness to help get humanity get back on the path to realising its full psycho-spiritual potential by laying the ground rules for us to rid ourselves, through ‘consciously suffering labours’, of the effects of the debilitating organ kundabuffer. Beelzebub had helped Ashiata Shiemash in his mission, and, as a reward for that assistance, Beelzebub was released from his own banishment in our solar system (so there’s something going on here, of which we ought to take note, but we’ll take a stab at that in the upcoming chapters). And, to bring home to us the dire consequences of the dissemination of poorly thought-out clap-trap that was to wreak such havoc on this planet, Beelzebub tells us that Babylon itself – along with all its achievements and learning – was swept from history shortly after his visit.
Beelzebub finishes up this chapter by telling Hassein that, although the theories on the human soul disseminated by the ‘learned men’ of Babylon may have been the final nail in the coffin lid for the labours of Ashiata Shiemash on humanity’s behalf, they were not the major reason for the destruction of that messenger’s teachings. That privilege belonged to an individual called Lentrohamsamin, and he was a very dangerous chap because he’d managed to perfect his Objective Reason to the point where he’d been able to form his higher-being body (spirit, soul, whatever you want to call it) before everything went wrong. This is all very intriguing, not least because it hints that things can turn sour on us even after we’ve put in a load of hard yakka on ourselves, but Beelzebub is going to make us wait a while before he gets onto how Lentrohamsamin messed up and will instead explain to Hassein more about the Very Saintly Ashiata Shiemash – which will form the subject matter for the next few chapters.
So, what do we make of all that, then? Well, there’s a lot going on here, but I think it’s fair to say that the whole chapter is a kind of commentary on the instability of the human psyche, and that we can never truly benefit from our thoughts and actions unless we bring our centres into concert and exert Objective Reason.
The Persian king we hear about in this chapter is representative of many manifestations of psycho-spiritual immaturity and what happens when one of our three centres is allowed to run amok at the expense of a unified whole. Driven by greed, he acquires the energy to pursue his (base) desire of acquiring ever more gold. But he is pursuing a pipedream, and that energy soon dissipates to be replaced by a new energy that fuels a love of conquest. The king is a serial faddist (and so representative of many, many humans) who can never fully see things through to a successful end because he is acting from a single centre alone. When he was searching for the secret of turning base metal into gold, he was being ruled by Greed, by his emotional centre (note how he even tried to ‘import’ the intellectual energy from others, from the so-called ‘learned’ men rather than use his own nous). When he gave up on the quest for gold, the king became ruled by energy from his physical centre – his need to perpetrate violence and conquest on other nations. He was a totally unfulfilled individual, always hopping from one passion to the next.
And what about the ‘Tower-of-Babel’? As well as serving as a parable for the pitfalls of religious dogma and providing an example for false transmission of historical ‘truths’, I reckon we can also include it as a metaphor for the disjointed parts of the Self. All that talk of a human comprising an inner and outer self (or not), good versus evil, what, even, is good or evil, have just got to be more illustrations of the lesson that we can never get a true picture of any situation unless our centres are all unified into a single, unassailable whole.
As for poor old Hamolinadir, well he really drew the short straw in this chapter, didn’t he? Here was a man who was on the right path, who’d studied as far as he could go, and who’d managed to develop his ‘self-consciousness, impartiality, sincerity, sensibility of perception, and alertness’ as Beelzebub puts it. In other words, he’s a lot better off, a lot more advanced than most of us who simply walk the world asleep. But Gurdjieff’s point here is that although Hamolinadir was on the right path he had not yet reached the point where he was able to form his own opinions and make his own judgements based upon his own internal Objective Reason. My feeling, here, is that Gurdjieff is presenting Hamolinadir to us as a ‘stage’ on the path to psycho-spiritual maturity. To highlight it, he even has Beelzebub explain to Hassein in the digression about the Atheists, that humanity bases its interpretation of the Laws that make the Multiverse tick over on outside impressions, and that is exactly what Hamolinadir is doing by listening to all the old toot coming from the mouths of the proponents of the various theories. Were he fully aware of how the universal laws function in reality, he would have been able to see straight through the smokescreen and arrive at his own truths.
Just before I get on to a couple of self-help aspects from this chapter, I want to mention an extra few things. The first is the way that the Learned Society Akhaldan keeps popping its head up above the trenches as the chapters progress. We need to remember that this society was founded on Atlantis before it sunk beneath the waves and is, therefore, a kind of residue of what should be, a reminder of where we once were and where we need once more to be, and Atlantis itself is, I think, a metaphor for lost human potential and ability.
The next thing I want to just give a quick nod to is the mention in this chapter of Alchemy. Not the grubby, surface-level, base metal-into-gold blarney that the Persian king was so heavily into, but the ‘true’ science of Alchemy, as Beelzebub puts it. We’ll hear a lot more about this science as the work progresses, but for now, suffice to say that the transformation of dull and base material into noble gold is simply another metaphor for the transformation of our baser selves into higher beings. Now, the knowledge of how to achieve that is the secret we need to discover – and the trick is that, unlike the Persian king who tried to find his ‘secret’ anywhere and in anyone else, we must find it within ourselves.
And lastly, before the self-help section, I wonder why Beelzebub always has to land his ‘spaceship’ on water and keep it moored there until his return? It happens on every visit to Earth, and he has to sometimes travel a long distance from the ship to get to his final destination. You’d think such an advanced craft could be parked anywhere, wouldn’t you? So, what’s all that about, then? Well, I’m not quite sure just yet, but, for now, let’s hazard a guess that landing on a sea and then travelling up rivers is somehow symbolic of the Spiritual (water) intersecting with, and influencing (in the form of Beelzebub himself) the more mundane levels of existence (land). Something like that, anyway.
And last, but by no means least, a couple of self-help hints to take from this (very long) chapter.
The first is fads. Short lived fads (and fetishes) are a complete waste of time. We’ve all been guilty of them at some stage, and we’ve all regretted the waste of time, energy, and even money they have caused. I know it’s hard but try to stop and think before you embark upon something that does not take you forward as a human being. Enough said, as I have been as guilty as everyone else when it comes to indulging short-lived passions. Control those things! You’ll end up much better off.
And, lastly, I’d like to get back to Hamolinadir, What he faced was something we all face during our lives. Everything sounds plausible, everybody sounds as if they know what they’re talking about and are telling the truth. But what should we believe? We must learn to use our Objective Reason, take out all the white noise, look at the pure facts alone and then come to our own decision. Lots of things will try to thwart you in arriving at your own truth – love, hate, pity, any passion really – and what you end up with may even, at times, seem counter-intuitive, sometimes not be what you’d have liked as an outcome. Only in the pure light of Reason can we truly SEE. Sherlock Holmes was probably right. The white noise is emotion – block it out!. Look at the facts. Whatever remains, however improbable, is most likely the truth. And don’t take what you hear – or even see – at face value. WHERE IS THE EVIDENCE???!!!!
OK, that’s more than enough for this chapter. I’ve been banging on for what seems like ages. The next chapter explains more about the mission of Ashiata Shiemash to Earth and it’s pretty short, so I hope to see you there.
