Welcome back to this tour through G. I. Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson.
In this chapter, entitled The Very Saintly Ashiata Shiemash, sent from Above to Earth, Gurdjieff, through his mouthpiece of Beelzebub, finally begins to give us, his readers, an indication of what must happen if we are to fulfil our psycho-spiritual potential and free ourselves from walking this world asleep. In a way, it is also a veiled introduction into how Gurdjieff himself sees the teaching/initiation structure that must exist if we are to make progress on ourselves. The chapter is a bit of a new direction from what has gone on in the work before, but the content of the previous chapters and Beelzebub’s various jaunts off to our ill-fated planet do serve as an essential backdrop and introduction to what is introduced now as we approach the end of the first book of Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson. So, strap yourselves in, and here goes . . .
The chapter opens with Beelzebub reminding his grandson, Hassein, that, once in a while, the so-called OMNI-LOVING COMMON FATHER ENDLESSNESS decides to despatch one of his more advanced underlings to our planet, where they are incarnated into one of the three-brained locals – that’s us lot – with the mission to help us rid ourselves of the effects of that nefarious organ Kundabuffer. This time it was one Ashiata Shiemash who was given the thankless task of attempting to ‘shock’ us woe-begotten humans into a new way of ‘being’ so that we might finally grow up and act like the decent three-brained adult members of the multiverse family that it was our original destiny to become.
We have actually met this Ashiata Shiemash before, way back in the very first chapter of this online series, where it was explained – very briefly – that Beelzebub had afforded this messenger from ABOVE some assistance in his enterprise to help mankind sort its collective act out, thereby earning our lead character a reprieve from banishment in our solar system.
We are also given some historical perspective, being told that Ashiata Shiemash appeared on the planet around 700 years before the ‘Tower of Babel’ events narrated in the previous chapter – so we are possibly talking somewhere around 1200 BCE. He was born into a poor family of Sumerian descent in a small town called Pispascana, not far from Babylon itself, and spent time growing up in both places.
Now, it appears that Ashiata Shiemash somewhat broke the mould of your common-or-garden messenger sent from on high, because (a) he refused to start preaching to, and teaching the locals as everyone sent to do the job before him had done, and (b) he actually succeeded in the task allotted to him where all the others had failed. Intriguing? You betcha! So what did Ashiata Shiemash do that was so different – and successful? Well, it was pretty simple really. Rather than attempt a mass change of heart (something for which he must have realised he was on a hiding to nothing) Ashiata decided to train – thoroughly train – a group of initiates – or disciples – and through them to pass his knowledge and instruction down through the generations. What that would ensure was that the ‘knowledge’ and wisdom he imparted could be kept ‘pure’ and protected from the mass twistings and turnings and taking out of context that had so perverted and distorted the teachings of his predecessors. And, to keep his message unsullied, Ashiata developed a ‘Legominism’, essentially a set of truisms distilled into an essence that could be transmitted unchanged and unchangeable down through the generations. My way of looking at this concept is that Ashiata Shiemash developed a verbal/written blueprint so distilled that it carried within itself an unalienable truth. The ’meaning’ of this truth could be taught to members of succeeding generations – initiates – who could then disseminate the ‘knowledge’ to those with eyes to see and ears to hear. Ashiata Shiemash called his Legominism The Terror of the Situation.
The beauty of this system – as opposed to say, mass dissemination of knowledge through preaching to gatherings of thousands – is that the essence of the ‘truth’ is strictly controlled, and each new initiate goes to the font – the source – of the truth for their own instruction. There is no ‘middleman’ for this truth, no ever-outwardly increasing concentric circles of dissemination with commensurate danger of Chinese whispers and message distortion. Each new initiate, no matter how far down the generational line from Ashiata Shiemash they are, receives the Legominism the way its author intended.
Now, there are little tips and tricks of rhetoric of which the ancient orators were all too aware. The Roman declaimers, for instance, employed what was called a sententia to summarise and bang home the point of several preceding lines of exposition in one easy-to-understand maxim that was designed to by-pass the intellectual processes and smack the listener right in the emotion. It was the bit the audience took home with them: short, summarising, and powerful.
But this Legominism of Ashiata Shiemash was on a whole different level. It appears to have been designed to help the initiate understand the unalloyed truth behind how to correctly interpret and apply the three being impulses of Faith, Hope, and Love. The Legominism itself is discussed much more fully in the next chapter, but, for now, Beelzebub informs Hassein that the Legominism was passed down through lines of initiates and also recorded onto marble tablets, one of which has even survived down to the present day and is in the keeping of an initiate fraternity known as the Brotherhood-Olbogmek who reside somewhere in Central Asia. ‘Olbogmek’, we are told, means ‘There are not different religions, there is only one God.’ Very nice.
Beelzebub goes on to explain to Hassein that on his very last visit to Earth, he himself had the opportunity to become acquainted with the Legominism of Ashiata Shiemash and it was of great value to him as it finally allowed him to understand many strange aspects of humankind that had perplexed Beelzebub during his thousands of years of observing our species.
At this point in the narrative, Hassein wants to know more about Legominisms and what, exactly, they are, so Beelzebub fills in some history for his grandson. He explains that the system of what we might term ‘objective transmission of knowledge’ originated on Atlantis when that continent still existed. But it’s important, first, he tells Hassein, to understand what the word ‘initiate’ means:
There was a time, says Beelzebub, when the word ‘initiate’ was used to describe one thing only: three-brained earthlings who had acquired in their presences ‘almost equal objective data which could be sensed by other beings.’ (And we’ll come back to that bit in a minute because it’s quite intriguing). But for the last couple of hundred years, Beelzebub continues, the term ‘initiate’, in addition to its original meaning, has acquired another usage; that of members of hokey and sham occult societies and mystical schools whose prime purpose is to rip people off. Some of these bunko-artists, says Beelzebub, even try to pass themselves off as ‘Great Initiates’ after undergoing trumped-up rituals and ceremonies for access to ‘higher levels’ into which they wish to be inducted.
But back to the bit about ‘true’ initiates being those who have been entrusted with the transmission of genuine knowledge, and their ability to be somehow instinctively trusted and respected by those around them – not just other humans, but animals as well! Well, that’s interesting, isn’t it? The implication is that the acquisition of true ‘objective’ Reason (or close to it) somehow alters the energy we transmit (call it aura, magnetic field, whatever you like) to the extent that it can be picked up on and – and this is the important bit – create favourable impressions in everyone and everything with which it comes into contact. I’ll revisit that concept in the self-help section at the end of this post but, for now, it’s back to Beelzebub’s narrative and his narrowing down of the definition of the word ‘Legominism’.
The process by which a Legominism works – the objective transmission of knowledge – is, says Beelzebub, the only means by which events of remote antiquity have accurately passed down through the millennia to the present day. Only an unbroken chain of beings fully deserving of the term ‘initiate’ can be trusted to transmit knowledge and wisdom accurately. When we recall what happens when that is not the case – such as the ‘knowledge’ about the Tower of Babel we read about in the last chapter being reinvented and twisted out of all recognition – the result is gobbledygook and confusion. The very few scraps of past events and knowledge, mangled out of all semblance from their original and true state, that have accidentally managed to survive to today, says Beelzebub, are now so absurd and remote from their genuine relevance that he has had to refrain from laughing when he hears a so-called ‘learned one’ stand up and deliver a lecture (‘stories’ he calls them) on them.
And that’s where this chapter ends. I told you it was a short one. But its main function is to lay the groundwork for what is to come in the next part: The Terror of the Situation in which we get to find out some of the contents of the Legominism of Ashiata Shiemash and we shall have a crack at understanding why it is so important.
So, on to the self-help aspects of this chapter, and I want to talk about the terror of what used to be called ‘Chinese Whispers’; a child’s game in which somebody would whisper a phrase into the next person’s ear, who would do the same to the next, and so on and so forth, until the last person in the chain would say out loud what they had received in the whisper and it was compared to how the phrase had started out, often with quite startling results!
The same phenomenon, of course, happens in life. Gossip amongst friends, slander at the office, and all sorts of other he said-she said situations. Academia’s particularly culpable of this type of carry on. Entire careers are built upon ‘opinions’ which, when analysed in the light of the primary source (the original author) turn out to be exactly that – personal opinions – and often built upon quicksand.
So, just as Gurdjieff, through Beelzebub, recommends – only trust the primary source. The truth is discernible through objective Reason alone. Whenever you hear gossip, or hearsay, or any other derogatory or negative remarks about yourself, check the source before you do anything. You can save yourself a lot of hurt and negative energy.
And what about that bit where Beelzebub explains that when you start to improve yourself, it can be ‘sensed’ by those around you? We all know that some people are naturally ‘good’ with animals, don’t we? Now, whether or not that feeling of ‘ease’ we get with certain people is because they have done a decent job of balancing out their centres and inner energies, or because we somehow ‘sense’ that they are very good at what they do (a ‘competent-feeling’ doctor, a ‘genuine and caring’ religious person, a ‘wise’ human steeped in the knowledge of their field), is up to you to decide. Personally, I think that the very effort to make yourself into somebody that serves or helps others, also helps balance your inner energies – but that’s just my take on it. You must make up your own minds.
So that’s it for this post. I hope to see you all in the next . . .
