Welcome back to this tour through G. I. Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson.
Well, we are now into the final few chapters of Book 1 of Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson and beginning to get a handle on what it is that Gurdjieff wants us to understand (or at least make a start on understanding) about the tragedy of the human condition and what we can do about it to fulfil our sadly neglected psycho-spiritual potential. The previous chapter reintroduced us to Ashiata Shiemash, a messenger sent to Earth from ON HIGH to help jolt humankind out of its spiritual lethargy, and we learned that he had devised a Legominism – ‘The Terror of the Situation’ – as a kind of set-in-rock set of axiomatic truisms. The Legominism functions as a go-to reference for successive generations of initiates or disciples with the idea being that its unalloyed message, being inviolable (much like the Hebrew Torah is sometimes said to be) must and can only be read and understood the same way by each new initiate to whom it is revealed, irrespective of how far down the chain from its creation they are exposed to it. An algebraic equivalent may be something like Einstein’s famous E=mc² a formula that can and does mean only one thing no matter who looks at it and when.
This new chapter is quite a bit longer than the last with a lot more fodder for discussion, so I hope you’ll bear with me as I fight my way through it. It is called The Legominism concerning the deliberations of the Very Saintly Ashiata Shiemash under the title of ‘The Terror of the Situation’ and, as the title suggests, it contains the content of that exalted messenger’s observations on the human condition as embodied in his Legominism or set of truths – call it whatever makes you feel most comfortable.
Now, please don’t get put off by all the strange and seemingly cobbled-together words that Gurdjieff has Beelzebub use throughout the work (if you read the originals, that is) because, although they can – and do – have cryptic symbolism embedded in them (the fragment of the Earth that broke off during the planet’s formatory phases – Anulios – for instance is held by some to be an anagram containing, amongst other elements, the Latin word luna or moon) it would be a sorry, or even morally bankrupt, system that was so esoteric that only very few could actually ‘get it’. Gurdjieff himself was quite emphatic that his All and Everything series was written to be understood on many different levels so that anybody, no matter what their level of personal development, could extract some meaning from it. And, in my opinion, what we are all meant to extract from the chapter I’m about to go through, is a pretty straightforward critique on how we benighted three-brained non-starters manage to get even the basics of human decency so badly wrong. So, again, please stay with me and let’s see how we go . . .
Beelzebub begins his exposition on the Legominism (and we must remember that Beelzebub claims to have read the sole surviving tablet personally) by informing his grandson, Hassein, that it began with a prayer by Ashiata Shiemash dedicated to objective fairness towards all things. That was followed by a kind of mission statement in which our Holy Messenger informs his readers that his objective is to help rid humanity of the pernicious after-effects of the organ Kundabuffer whose function had initially been to prevent humanity achieving objective consciousness and thereby perceive the cock-up perpetrated by, for want of a better term, the ‘cosmic engineers’ – and if you’ve been following the series this far, you’ll probably have come to the realisation that the organ Kundabuffer is no more nor less than an extended metaphor for humanity’s almost wilful and self-destructive bent to shirk its responsibility to be a productive and positive-energy-generating part of the All & Everything by realising its full psycho-spiritual potential. We can all, every single one of us, be so much more than we are if we step up to the mark and make the effort. We must stop walking this world asleep . . . and soon, because it is falling apart around our ears!
Right, enough of the lecture and on with the text . . .
Ashiata talks about his predecessors, those other Sacred Individuals entrusted with the thankless task of making us lot listen to Reason and points out that they had attempted to achieve their objective by focusing on one of what he says are ‘the three sacred ways for self-perfecting’; namely the being-impulses of FAITH, HOPE, and LOVE.
Ashiata seems to have known who, or rather what, he was, because he talks about being ‘commanded from above’ to begin preparing his incarnated form to develop Objective Impartiality from age 17. At that early stage, he also had the intention of following in his forebears’ footsteps by exploring how to achieve his goal through the avenues of FAITH, HOPE, or LOVE. But, as he encountered more and more of the Babylonian population and got to learn their ways and observe their foibles, doubt began to creep in about whether the tools of FAITH, HOPE, or LOVE would be enough to achieve what he had been sent to accomplish. The consequences of the after-effects of the organ Kundabuffer were now just too entrenched. Humanity was simply too far gone down the path of self-delusion to respond to appeals to its innate nature (innate that is, as far as its original pre-Kundabuffer destiny was intended).
Poor old Ashiata was a bit gob-smacked at that point, and so, as I hope this series has taught us all so far, he decided not to just jump on in and hope for the best, but to delay his decision, to delay his reaction, and wait until he’d had a good old think about it and – and this is the important bit – got his three centres (physical, emotional, intellectual) working harmoniously and efficiently together so that whatever he did next came from the most objective, balanced and informed position it possible could.
The self-discipline regime Ashiata embarked upon to balance his centres was pretty extreme and not to be tried at home (although he did have an advantage what with his being a special emissary sent from above and all that) and reads as if it deals to the disciplining and reining in of each centre in turn. In the time-honoured tradition he ascended a mountain (symbolic of his attempt to ‘elevate’ his being above the everyday, where everything tends towards the summit and becomes focused at the highest point). For the first forty days and nights, Ashiata knelt on his knees and worked on his concentration. For the second forty days and nights, still on his knees, he neither ate nor drank but reran and analysed everything he had seen, heard, or otherwise ‘felt’ through his Reason (but, importantly, only those things he had seen, heard or felt since his ‘self-preparation’ began at age 17, the insinuation being that the impressions we receive once on the path, as it were, are of more value, hold more water, and can be better milked of meaningful content, than those we received when we were bombarded by the chaotic mishmash of a life led asleep). After that, Ashiata still wasn’t done. For a further forty days and nights, as ever on his knees, he neither ate nor drank but, every half-hour, plucked two hairs from his chest. Eh? Well, a part of me wants to conjecture that this was an effort, on Ashiata’s part, to somehow ‘ground’ himself, while all the asceticism and bodily nutrition deprivation was beginning to uncast his mind from its physical anchors – nothing like a little physical pain to stop your mind wandering off on its own – and we must remember this is all about getting the three centres working in harmony, therefore the mind could not be allowed to float off on its own little journey. So, to my way of thinking, we have Asiata Shiemash devoting forty days and nights x 3 (Gurdjieff, through Beelzebub, does not specify whether these 40 day periods were consecutive – probably as a way of demarcating the centres) to (1) reining in the emotional centre by refusing to let the mind dwell on (absent) passions, (2) reining in the intellectual centre by rerunning and retrospectively recalibrating all mental impressions – but only since Ashiata was sufficiently developed to stand a chance of accurate analysis, and (3) reining in the physical centre by the constant painful reminder of chest-hair plucking (incidentally, 2 hairs, plucked every 30 minutes for 40 days and nights comes out to a total of 3840, a significant number in numerology – and you can make of that what you will). By this stage, all three centres would have to be in play: The intellectual centre for being self-aware enough to demand the hair-plucking, the emotional centre for knowing that this was something unpleasant but necessary that must, nevertheless, be overcome to happen, and the physical centre for not only allowing but providing the mechanics for the plucking to go ahead. After forty days and nights of two-hair chest plucking, Ashiata Shiemash’s upper torso must have been pretty denuded – but he would also have become a pretty mean triple-centre-working-in-unison machine!
Ashiata certainly seemed to think so, as he describes the deprivations as having achieved for him what he set out to do. Having successfully blotted out all the white noise of day-to-day life – both physical and spiritual – his Reason (with a capital R) was now finally free to begin working on how to go about completing the mission he’d been sent to accomplish. And his newly unfettered cognitive processes soon brought him to the conclusion that he was really up against it. Humankind was completely buggered – Ashiata had been bunged a hospital pass!
The problem was that humanity’s concept of the three possible get-out-of-jail free cards – FAITH, HOPE, and LOVE – were completely skewed thanks to one of the effects of the organ Kundabuffer which had, as part of its remit to keep us all in temporary ignorance, diverted our energies into believing in and practising things that were kind of similar to, but in reality oh-so-very-far from, those three true sacred being-impulses. When it was finally decreed that the organ be removed from our species, it was too late. Our warped Kundabuffer days interpretation of FAITH, HOPE, and LOVE refused to budge, even though we were once again, in theory, freed from all artificial self-developmental restraint, and at liberty to work ourselves out, as it were.
The crux of the issue, according to Ashiata Shiemash, was that humanity remained incapable of practising FAITH, HOPE, or LOVE purely objectively; that is, by employing rationality, feeling, and physicality all in concert and all at the same time. When we do not do that – i.e. we go at one of those three being-impulses with an unbalanced and inharmonious mixture of one or more of rationality, feeling, and physicality – the results can be disastrous, both for ourselves and for those around us.
As far as FAITH was concerned, Ashiata points out that the humans of his time were susceptible to any old toot or belief system, so long as it pandered to their own vanities. Nothing changes, just look at some of the more outrageous movements of the last century, at ideologies responsible for the deaths of millions, and into whose ridiculous propaganda entire nations bought – many because it made a siren call to their own self-conceit.
Where it concerned LOVE, Ashiata noted a total lack of consensus amongst humans on what that term even means. To some it was a sexual thing, to others emotional, and to others still, a materialistic phenomenon. In other words, everyone’s experience and understanding of LOVE was purely subjective – there was always some degree of ‘what do I get out of this?’ involved. In contrast, true LOVE, says our Messenger from Above, must be genuine, impartial, and totally selfless (non-egoistic is the word he uses). Now, that kind of love is rare indeed, and I think it’s worth exploring a bit further on down this post.
That left HOPE. And at this point Ashiata really threw up his hands in despair. Even more so than FAITH and LOVE, the being-impulse of HOPE in contemporary humans is skewed out of all recognition. What we falsely interpret as HOPE is either engendered in ourselves by accidental and/or false circumstances, or deliberately implanted within us by external factors or forces. Either way, this thing we interpret as HOPE is an alien thing, lacking in any substance, but – and this is the killer – by its overpoweringly alluring siren call it succeeds in blotting out any chance we may have had for acquiring objective FAITH and LOVE. There are too many examples of this imposter to list here, but the word ‘gambling’ should suffice to illustrate what I mean.
I’ll have a lot more to say about the dangers of indiscriminately exercising FAITH, HOPE and LOVE without getting your centres pulling together in the self-help section at the end of this post; but, until then, be warned. These so-called being-impulses are extremely powerful things that can be hideously dangerous to ourselves and all around us if we don’t make at least some effort to rein them in. The perilous state of the wider world around us at the time of writing is ample testament to that!
So, Ashiata Shiemash, whose self-imposed retreat on Mount Veziniama had resulted in his being able to function with his three centres working in concert, came to the conclusion that humankind was incapable of experiencing any of the three sacred being-impulses of FAITH, HOPE, and LOVE while its three centres each danced to its own individual tune. It was time to think again about how he was to accomplish his Mission.
And think he did. After a while, Ashiata realised that there was one other being-impulse that he could enlist into achieving his purpose, a being-impulse that was quintessential to the normal and correct functioning of all three-brained citizens of the Multiverse, and one which, remarkably, was not yet too badly mangled in the three-brained unfortunates of planet Earth. That being-impulse was Objective-Conscience, and Ashiata reckoned that if he could winkle it out of humanity’s subconscious where, for an overwhelming majority of humans, it lay semi-dormant, and ‘awaken’ it in the waking-conscious mind, there was hope yet for our benighted species.
And I have to stop there and pause for a moment, because this is pretty much what it’s all about. THE EMPLOYMENT OF OBJECTIVE-CONSCIENCE IN ALL OUR THOUGHTS AND DEEDS. Gurdjieff, through Beelzebub, is by no means the first to come up with this concept – it’s been knocking around the schools of philosophy and religion for aeons – and I dare say he will not be the last, but it is an ideal that is at once blindingly obvious and yet bloody difficult to implement. To achieve consistent, waking, objective-conscience takes a lot of dedication and work (as Ashiata himself found out up on Mount Veziniama) but there are rewards to be had from our efforts as we make the journey, and, eventually, we will cease to walk this world asleep!
But back to Ashiata’s mission, and his terminology’s all about how he’s now running nicely on all three cylinders (his centres) and using phrases like understanding ‘with all the separate ruminating parts representing the whole of my “I”’. If he can find some way to get humanity to start applying Objective-Conscience in its waking-conscious state, Ashiata Shiemash is onto a winner!
Ashiata’s Legominism, The Terror of the Situation, ends up with a prayer for the Highest Power to bless this course of action upon which he has decided, and then Beelzebub takes back control of the chapter’s narrative by explaining to Hassein that he made it a priority for himself, while on Earth, to investigate whether Ashiata had managed to pull off what he intended.
It was during that investigation that Beelzebub came across the Brotherhood-Olbogmek (whose name, we recall from the previous chapter translates as ‘There are not different religions, there is only one God’) who were in possession of the sole surviving marble tablet on which were engraved sayings and counsels designed to guide humanity down the path to achieving Objective-Conscience. And on that tablet were inscribed three stanzas, each one dedicated to one of the three sacred being-impulses FAITH, LOVE, and HOPE. Each stanza comprises three lines, each of which relates to an aspect of that concept’s relationship to consciousness, feeling, and body – in that order – but only the first of which is positive.
This is how they go:
Faith of consciousness is freedom / Faith of feeling is weakness / Faith of body is stupidity.
Love of consciousness evokes the same in response / Love of feeling evokes the opposite / Love of body depends only on type and polarity.
Hope of consciousness is strength / Hope of feeling is slavery / Hope of body is disease.
We’ll have a go at unravelling those lines further down the post, but first, Beelzebub enlarges, for Hassein’s sake, on what Ashiata Shiemash meant when he singled out the being-impulse HOPE as being even more badly twisted out of true in contemporary humans than either FAITH or LOVE.
What Gurdjieff, through Beelzebub, describes at this point in the narrative is not really something that we would immediately identify as being synonymous with HOPE, but rather, when you think about it, a concept that is inextricably entwined with it. It is the concept of procrastination, of serially putting off what should be started now. Procrastination (Gurdjieff has Beelzebub call this disease ‘Tomorrow’ – the Latin verb procrastinare meaning ‘to ‘delay’ or defer’ contains the adverbial term cras meaning ‘Tomorrow’) manifests in us especially when what we know must be done involves application, hard work and, often, the postponement of immediate gratification or pleasure.
Where HOPE comes into this, is that we somehow convince ourselves that what we are putting off doing is going to (a) remain in its exact same state until we get around to it, (b) get done by somebody else, or (c) go away of its own accord. Well, you may get lucky once in a while but that is not, generally, the way this world works.
What Gurdjieff is pointing out here is that we, as humans, are shirking our responsibility to behave like normal three-brained universal beings by repeatedly putting off beginning the work on ourselves that will transform what we are into efficient energy convertors for the Multiverse, a state that comes with all sorts of beneficial side-effects both for ourselves and those around us. We probably wouldn’t equate that perpetual postponement of self-betterment with ‘hope’ – but that’s exactly what it is. Because, deep down, we are hoping that the opportunity for psycho-spiritual improvement will still be there until such time as we eventually get around to it. Gurdjieff, though, through the mouthpiece of Beelzebub, explains that is not the case. The longer we defer taking that first step on the road to a unified ‘I’ the harder it will become. The older we become, the faster we lose the faculties we need to achieve a lasting result on what we have been given to improve. Many chapters ago, Gurdjieff sent out veiled warnings that if we fail – in simple terms – to consciously transform the energy around us and crystalise it into personal being-forms that are more durable than the purely physical, then the basic being, the embryonic soul-in-waiting, as it were, simply dissolves back into the universal energy soup. No more ‘you’. The All & Everything could not make any further use of you in that state – in terms of the greater machine, you were a failed experiment, time to reclaim what it can and redistribute it elsewhere in the hope that the next coalescence of that raw energy might do a better job with it.
Crikey, that last paragraph was a bit harsh, wasn’t it? I think that, sometimes, Gurdjieff can get a bit more ‘urgent’ with his message, and the passage in question in this particular chapter is a case in point. In a sense, what Gurdjieff is espousing here is very practical advice; that is, get around to helping Yourself (with a capital Y) out before it’s too late. He even has Beelzebub point out that as we humans age and the distance to the ‘Great Unknown’ gets whittled down by time, many of us (finally freed from the restrictions of the deteriorating organ Kundabuffer – for which read that our deteriorating senses make us no longer able to get so lost in the world around us) feel a yearning to understand The Infinite. But often, by that stage, it’s too late. We have become too impregnated by the heaviness of the world, too distracted by its fleeting trivialities. There is simply not enough time left to successfully reverse the trend.
Or at least that’s what Beelzebub infers. Personally, I feel that it’s never too late to try again, that something good will always come of it we make the effort to change ourselves for the better. But, hey-ho, Gurdjieff’s probably just putting the frighteners on us – one of his ‘jolts’ to shake us out of our torpor and get our collective backsides in gear sooner rather than later.
But back to the narrative, and this rather long chapter ends with Beelzebub explaining to Hassein that as soon as Ashiata Shiemash had decided upon the best way to accomplish his mission on Earth, he once more ascended Mount Veziniama (which could easily be a metaphor for Ashiata’s very own state of ataraxia, his very own ‘mind-fortress’). There, he had a good old think about how he was going to get all us wayward human beings to awaken the Objective-Conscience currently slumbering in our subconscious and train us to make it a permanently alert participant in our waking state. He was going to teach us, he’d decided, to walk the world awake!
Wow! There is so much in this chapter that we can adapt and use for our self-help journey, but first let’s have a crack at seeing if we can eke out what Gurdjieff was getting at with the three-stanza declamation Ashiata had had carved into the marble tablet still held by the Brotherhood-Olbogmek, even the translation of whose name – ‘There are not different religions, there is only one God’ – is, in my opinion, a bit of a clue to what is going on here. What do I mean by that last bit? Well, given Gurdjieff’s penchant for writing simultaneously on different levels, if we strip the translation of Olbogmek of its religious connotations and interpret God as an individual’s unified ‘I’ we are left with the meaning that the impressions we receive of the world around us through our separated centres – physical, emotional, intellectual, the ‘different religions’ as it were – are not real. Only when we look around ourselves with a unified ‘I’ do we perceive what is truly there.
So, let’s take another look at Ashiata Shiemash’s three-line stanzas; only this time, we’re going to group them into the categories of Consciousness, Feeling, and Body.
Faith of consciousness is freedom
Love of consciousness evokes the same in response
Hope of consciousness is strength
I think what’s important here is that, in the above three lines, we are dealing with the concept of Consciousness and not just thinking in the sense of letting random impressions coalesce into what we think of as ‘thoughts’ inside our heads. Whereas the other two ‘groupings’ – Body and Feeling – might be taken to equate to the functioning physical and emotional centres respectively, Consciousness is the result of using all three centres – physical, emotional, intellectual – all at the same time and in harmony. Consciousness is the waking awareness of how you are feeling physically, what you are feeling emotionally, and what you are thinking mentally. It is the little you sitting above those other three yous, not only analysing and understanding why your body/emotion/thoughts are doing what they are doing but, crucially, based on that information, planning out the next rational and sensible step.
In that sense, then, Faith of Consciousness, that is, belief in Consciousness, truly is freedom. It is the freedom that comes from being fully aware that whatever course of action (or non-action, because as many philosophical schools teach, inaction can often be just as effective as action) the fully conscious you decides upon at any given time, it will be the best that you, personally, can do. In this state of consciousness, there is no room for doubt, no room, even, for remorse, because you will have done (or not done) what is right and appropriate under the prevailing set of circumstances. It is difficult to over-emphasise just how powerful a fully aware conscious-minded state can be in a human. In a sense, it is a way of seeing into and affecting the future, because you can analyse in such crystal clarity that you can predict what are the most likely outcomes to situations in which you find yourself. Ashiata Shiemash managed to achieve that sense of conscious clarity when he realised that humanity was not capable of functioning correctly unless he took the appropriate action to ‘jolt’ them into using what was latent within themselves.
And what about Love of consciousness evokes the same in response? This one seems, to me at least, to be pretty straightforward. To unselfishly desire the consciousness to be able to help others through selfless and unbiased analysis releases back to you the growing awareness that love itself is an extremely powerful force that cannot and should not be employed selfishly. Conscious Love is what we should all be striving for (far more easily said than done, I know). So, what is this Conscious Love, then? Well, on one level it means – to my mind anyway – the ability to understand why you love (or think you love) some person or some thing and to ensure that the love you feel is not selfish or harmful in any way. Are you using your love to restrict, to trap another against their will? Is the love you feel not love but covetousness, either for some person or even some material thing? Is the love you feel just physical lust? If you ticked any of the above boxes, then chances are that what you are feeling is not love at all, but a craving for control or sating of physical desire. If we can learn to love consciousness and awaken ourselves to what it is really like to ‘see’, then the gift we receive in return is the ability to understand what Love truly is and thereby (and this comment comes from a purely self-help perspective) save ourselves a whole world of potential pain.
And I’m just going to mention what I, personally, term “Umbrella Love’ here. It was something that happened to me in my mid-twenties. I was romantically unattached at the time, it happened in a pub, and I was a few beers to the wind, so make of this what you will. I was chatting to an elderly lady at the bar, someone I’d seen there before but had never spoken with. She used to come in once a week, purchase a half-pint of Guiness, and simply stand at the bar until her drink was consumed, then leave. On this particular occasion, I engaged the old lady in conversation, and she told me that her weekly half-pint of Guinness routine was in memory of her long-deceased husband whose favourite drink the black stuff had been. I recall being very touched by this, but then something quite incredible happened that I shall always remember. A feeling of all-enveloping love descended upon me (funny that I still, to this day, think of that feeling as ‘descending’ upon me); not just towards the lovely old lady standing before me, but towards everyone and everything that was, is, and will be. It was bordering on blissful if I can use such a word, and, even back then, the term came to me that what I was experiencing was ‘Umbrella Love’. There was no reason, at that time and in that place, for me to suddenly be experiencing such a powerful, lovely emotion (and I use that word as one of convenience) and I think that its strength and beauty came from the fact that what I was experiencing was something – a Love – that was entirely selfless, something that was so much more than when and where I was. So, there you go. Conscious, selfless untainted Love (sorry Soft Cell!) or too many beers? I know which I thought it was.
And so, onto the third rearranged line: Hope of consciousness is strength. Well, if we recall from what was said in the latter part of the chapter about how Hope is the most skewed of what Gurdjieff calls the three sacred Being-Impulses, then this one is also fairly easy to get our heads around. If Hope in contemporary humans (as defined by Beelzebub) is nothing more than ill-founded and misplaced wishful thinking, then putting that energy into something positive such as the ability to operate at a waking-conscious level must be a good thing. Hope, as consciously directed energy, can be the fuel to help us achieve that beneficial state. Hope, as an almost tangible thing, functions as both a support and a goad to drive us on to achieve waking-consciousness – hope, directed in this dynamic, positive way, is the absolute opposite of that lethargic and negative wishy-washiness that Beelzebub describes contemporary, non-awake humans as practising.
We could go on and on about the benefits of waking-consciousness, so let’s switch now from the correct and positive application of Faith, Love, and Hope to Consciousness and look instead at their negative application to Feeling. Here are the rearranged lines:
Faith of feeling is weakness
Love of feeling evokes the opposite
Hope of feeling is slavery
The trick here, I think, is to think of Feeling as emotion, or the emotional centre acting alone or, at least, as the primary driver. The concept of emotion (or passion, to many philosophical schools the two are indistinguishable) is one of the most written about since humans learnt to scratch out symbols on recording materials. Emotions/Passions are incredibly powerful, not only in their effect on our senses and even physical features, but also in what they are capable of driving us to do. Some schools of thought (such as the Stoics) believed that Passion and Reason could not co-exist; others (such as Aristotle and the Peripatetics) believe that there was a use for Passion if it could be reined in by Reason, such as in warfare where it could be harnessed as aggressive energy. It’s pretty obvious from the three lines on Ashiata Shiemash’s tablet, though, into which of those two camps Gurdjieff’s opinion on Passion falls, so let’s deal with them swiftly:
Faith of feeling is weakness – If you believe in, have faith in, your emotions/passions, then you make yourself vulnerable and expose yourself to all sorts of consequences – from unnecessary despair to violent outbursts with life-threatening consequences to yourself and others. Reliance on emotion/passion to get you through life is false reliance. There are plenty of people out there who state things like ‘Oh, I wear my heart on my sleeve; when something affects me, I just can’t help myself and it all bursts out!’ and others who have no control over their anger, or their spite, or even their lust. That type of person is often the type that ends up wearing the consequences (often destructive) of letting emotion take the driving seat. There are too many examples to make a comprehensive list, but road rage, lashing out either physically or verbally at a loved one, stalking, and malicious rumours sparked by envy are just a few that illustrate how pernicious passions can be. Any kind of belief that passions can bring advantage is a false belief!
Love of feeling evokes the opposite – This one, I think, is about over-indulgence in passion/emotion. There are those who wallow in self-pity because they crave attention (Münchhausen Syndrome is an extreme case of this where people feign or even actively induce illness, injury, or abuse to attract attention and/or sympathy). There are others who crave violence or seek deliberately to make relationships difficult because they get off on the resultant quarrels and the rush-like high of the making-up; or those who agitate confrontation (quite often in the workplace) so that they can feel smug and superior when they implement their well-practised put-downs. There are many other types of these “Emotion Junkies”, humans who are so committedly in love with emotion and passion because they honestly believe it is the closest they will get to truly feeling who they really are – “I just feel so alive when I’m all wound up and living life on the edge,” they say. But it’s all transient. It’s all a lie. Passion is powerful, but it’s got no stamina. Anger fizzles out, lust fizzles out, excitement fizzles out . . . and we are left with nothing, we are left empty. And that, I feel, is what Gurdjieff means when he says that Love of feeling evokes the opposite. He is, perhaps, referring to that absence of feeling, that emptiness, the cold ashes that are left in the hearth where the hot fire of passion has burnt itself out.
Hope of feeling is slavery – The nub of this one seems to be similar to what we have already said above; that is, any kind of hope that passions can bring advantage is a false hope! Hoping that the object of your desire will desire you back, hoping that the anxiety caused by your financial problems will be resolved with a lotto win, hoping that you won’t feel so bored tomorrow because something is bound to come along. Sorry, but that is all pie-in-the-sky stuff. It’s wishful thinking. While you are fixated on your hope that these things may come to pass, you are doing nothing. You are treading water. By putting all your eggs in the hope basket, you have actively prevented yourself from taking remedial action. To all intents and purposes, you have become enslaved by your hope.
And so, onto the negative application of Faith, Love, and Hope to Body. Here are the rearranged lines:
Faith of body is stupidity
Love of body depends only on type and polarity
Hope of body is disease
In a way, these three lines, dealing as they do, with the physical or moving centre, are both the easiest and the most difficult from which to wring any sense – but we’ll have a go at it anyway:
Faith of body is stupidity – I think that this is straightforward. Belief that you can rely solely on your physical being, the tangible collection of atoms and molecules that comprises your body and wobbly bits inside, to either get you through life or advance your psycho-spiritual potential, is unfounded belief. Our bodies are vehicles that work in concert with other elements that constitute what we think of as ‘us’. Look after them, certainly, but do not think for one second that a perfectly honed and nutrified physique alone is going to advance your overall state of ‘being’. Bodies age, bodies decay. Just like the Olympic sprinter with the superstar muscles, without willpower, without technique, without taking into account everything around you, you are not going to cross that finishing line first.
Love of body depends only on type and polarity – This one’s about physical attraction, the inability to see beyond the corporeal into what’s inside. If you ‘love’ with your body alone, those to whom you are attracted will be limited to a specific physical ‘type’ and ‘polarity’. I could hazard a lot of guesses as to what Gurdjieff means by ‘polarity’ here, but I am assuming that what he is getting at is that the body’s general leaning towards a particular physical ‘type’ and ‘polarity’ acts as a restricting and preventative filter unless we are able to open our entire beings and discover true, objective Love.
Hope of body is disease – This is the difficult one, and I’m really not sure what exactly to make of it. It depends, I suppose – as with all the other lines – on whether the of in Hope of Body refers to what happens if the Being-impulse of Hope is attempted by the physical centre alone. If that is the case, then clearly, continually allowing your body to consume and drink whatever it wants without the rational intervention of the other centres, is going to result at some stage in disease – problems with obesity, rotten teeth, liver sclerosis, whatever. So, we have to get back to what Gurdjieff, through Beelzebub, was telling us earlier: that Hope is the most out-of-whack of all the so-called sacred Being-impulses in humanity. If the body relies on Hope that it can, with impunity, eat, drink and behave in whatever way it wants (without the handbrake of Reason), then that Hope will, indeed, result in physical disease of some description.
Ok. Blimey, that was a bit of a journey! I think Gurdjieff’s three-line stanzas above gave us the opportunity to explore most of the self-help stuff we were going to take a look at, so I’ll keep the rest of this post brief:
Build your Self-reliance as much as you can. Relying on what might or could be (a lotto win, that person you fancy eventually noticing you exist, the extra weight you’re carrying to miraculously drop off by itself, whatever) is highly unlikely to happen, so you must move forward under your own conscious steam. Sure, continue buying that lotto ticket (you never know your luck) but make sure to put aside savings, however little, on a regular basis. Join a dating site, you never know who might be out there just waiting for you – you may not be everybody’s cup of tea, but you’re bound to be somebody’s. Take steps to lose weight and tone up: vary your diet, get out and about, do more exercise, join a gym, maybe. Whatever it is that’s holding you back, you have the power to change it. Don’t, as Gurdjieff warns, hang all your dreams on hope alone – start to take control!
Phew, that’s it for now, then. The next post will continue the story of the mission of Ashiata Shiemash and how he went about organising the conditions to further his aims for humanity. I hope to see you all there.
