Welcome back to this tour through G. I. Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson.
Well, we have arrived at the final chapter of Book 1 in this series, entitled The chief culprit in the destruction of all the Very Saintly Labors of Ashiata Shiemash.
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear . . .
This is, again, quite a lengthy chapter, and it’s yet another indictment of our benighted species and its total inability to get its psycho-spiritual act together; but it’ll be worthwhile sticking with me right to the very end, because there Gurdjieff, through Beelzebub, gives us the clearest hints yet of what we can expect to happen if we bother doing some work on ourselves – or not, as the case may be.
The chapter begins with Beelzebub explaining to Hassein that the destruction of Ashiata Shiemash’s excellent system designed to induce active conscious rationality in humankind was not due to the efforts of the conclave of so-called ‘learned men’ gathered in Babylon that we met in Chapter 16 of this series, The Fifth Flight to Earth. Those people, says Beelzebub, were only ‘contagious bacilli’ who unconsciously disseminated rubbish theories down the generations (which is Gurdjieff having a bit of a pop at many contemporary ‘experts’ and academics who promote all sorts of baseless tripe without properly thinking it through). Just as a quick aside, here, that bit in the biblical Tower of Babel story where mankind was ‘punished’ for daring to aspire to touch the divine by being split into separate nations with mutually unintelligible tongues, is, in my mind, a metaphor for losing the common-language of pure Reason; because it is only by reacquiring that, that we can all move forwards together and develop as a species.
Anyway, back to the narrative, and Beelzebub says that, no, it wasn’t those pretty useless ‘learned men’ who consigned Ashiata Shiemash’s masterplan for humanity to the scrap heap of history, but a single individual who went by the name of Lentrohamsanin.
Now, this Lentrohamsanin was a very interesting chap. He had been born around 200 years before Beelzebub’s fifth flight to Earth, during which our narrator had ended up at the great enclave of ‘learned men’ in Babylon. During his own lifetime, Lentrohamsanin had succeeded in coating his terrestrial body with a higher-being body capable of Objective Reason through a process that Beelzebub goes on to elucidate.
Now, we need briefly to pause the narrative flow at this point to remind ourselves that the acquisition of a higher-being body comes about through a form of energy purification; that is, one type of energy is transformed through conscious effort into ‘food’ that feeds the creation of something else that is a higher ‘you’ than your physical form. The only prerequisite for that energy transmutation is that the ‘effort’ is a conscious one, and that is something we really need to take note of because it becomes quite important when we get to the end of the chapter. The ‘conscious effort’ we put in is not ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in and of itself – it is simply a means – an engine if you like – for energy transformation. Remember that for later. Oh, and by the way, also bear in mind the word Hasnamuss, a kind of derogatory term that Beelzebub uses to label people who we might today describe as ‘wasters’ – but much more about them later, too.
OK, so, Beelzebub informs Hassein that this Lentrohamsanin, while he was knocking around the Earth in physical form two centuries before Beelzebub was in Babylon, formulated some kind of composition or theory which was recorded on a Kashireitleer, an animal hide used as a kind of proto-parchment. It was this Kashireitleer that found its way down the ages to the great enclave in Babylon where, upon its promulgation, it proceeded to wreak havoc (this is why Beelzebub calls the ‘learned men’ at the enclave ‘contagious bacilli’ because they became the mindless disseminators of Lentrohamsanin’s writings upon returning to their own lands).
What follows is Beelzebub explaining to his grandson the sequence of events that led to Lentrohamsanin composing his theory. It is a study in how a set of random circumstances, coupled with a particular Zeitgeist, can result in something which, once passed onto and accepted by other humans who have acquired some level of ‘authority’ in the eyes of other human beings, can run around the world and become established as an ‘incontrovertible truth’. So, let’s take a closer look at Lentrohamsanin’s story . . .
He was born, so reports Beelzebub, on the continent of Asia, in Kronbookhon, the capital of a country called Nievia, to which place his already elderly parents had moved three years previously. Sadly, Lentrohamsanin’s parents had been so engrossed in materialism and acquiring wealth, that any pregnancies up until that time had been dealt with by abortion. Lentrohamsanin’s father eventually built up a little business empire of caravans and caravanserais, while his mother, originally a ‘Toosidji’ (whatever that is, but I’m guessing from what follows it was some kind of female temple attendant, however you want to interpret that) had subsequently founded what sounds like a scam ‘Holy Mountain’ retreat designed to attract and treat those women who were having difficulty conceiving.
Another little aside, here, just to mention that, in this last chapter of the first book, Gurdjieff, through Beelzebub, is bringing together some ‘teachings’ from previous chapters, by ‘reminding’ us that, for instance, Lentrohamsanin’s father was ‘the-source-of-the-active-principle-of-his-origin’ while his mother was ‘the-source-of-the-passive-principle-of-his-origin’ which all links back to the concept of Exioȅhary and the Law of Threes that we examined in Chapter 14 – The Fourth Sojourn on Earth-Part I. So, bearing in mind that this last chapter in the first book is a bit of a revision session, let’s read on . . .
Having accrued plenty of dosh, Lentrohamsanin’s parents eventually decided it was time to have a kid of their own, so they settled down in Kronbookhon. Being elderly, it took a while, but after a lot of advice-seeking (however not, funnily enough, from the mother-to-be’s own Holy Mountain Conception Expert Centre) a pregnancy occurred and Lentrohamsanin came into the world.
As an only child, he was spoilt rotten by his mum and dad and given the best upbringing and education money could buy. Personal tutors were drafted in from all over, but chiefly from Egypt with the result that Lentrohamsanin accrued an immense store of data which comprised of much what Beelzebub calls ‘fantastic and dubious information’. By the time he reached the age of a responsible being (I am assuming this means 17 or thereabouts) he had amassed a huge amount of knowledge but – and this is the important bit – no corresponding ‘Being’. He was like a library that was not being used – the information was all there, but it was useless if it was not going to be analysed or applied through the filter of a consciously rational mind. Having received no guidance on how to conceptualise consciously and rationally, poor young Lentrohamsanin fell prey to our old friend, the organ Kundabuffer, which ensured that all his learning resulted in was a swaggering egotist who felt that the world would be a better place if he were to become a universally renowned learned being. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Sounds like a lot of people we know, doesn’t it?
After many days of pondering, our young buck decided that the most direct route to worldwide recognition would be to invent a theory hitherto undreamt of and commit it to a Kashireitleer (a writing surface made from buffalo hide) of unique device. A normal Kashireitleer comprised of a single buffalo hide, but the young man had his slaves make one using one hundred hides. Lentrohamsanin was going big!
Once the massive Kashireitleer was ready, our ambitious know-it-all began to write. And what he wrote about was something that nobody before him had seen fit to discuss before – and nor, says Beelzebub snarkily, was there any reason for them to have done so. Lentrohamsanin’s chosen subject was a criticism of every aspect of what Beelzebub calls ‘the existing order of collective existence’, in other words, social structure and government.
Very much along the lines of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (a work with which Gurdjieff would have been familiar) with some anti-religious dogma thrown in, Lentrohamsanin’s ‘theory’ decried the exploitation of common labour by a ruling elite that promised a reward in the next life for those who worked hard and did what they were told in this one. Humankind could only be truly free if it cast off its shackles of dependency on unelected leaders and the illusory idea of a better life after death. The existing order should be destroyed and swept away, and new leaders put in place, sourced from those who actually did the hard work, elected with no discrimination against sex or age, and in an equal and open ballot.
To promote his work of self-conceived ‘genius’, Lentrohamsanin organised a huge and costly banquet to which, at his own expense, he invited all the learned men of his country, Nievia. Their reaction to the new theory was one of astonishment; firstly, because they wondered why none of them had come up with this revolutionary new concept themselves, and secondly, because they had no idea that such a genius as Lentrohamsanin had been dwelling in their midst. The assembled learned men, led by their most venerable grey beard employing the self-important tone of an over-inflated ego, hailed this brilliant young mind as a ‘Messiah of Divine consciousness sent from Above to reveal World-truths’.
The crowd of supposedly educated men then proceeded to jostle one another in order to get closer to their ‘New Messiah’ and fawn all over him. This was symptomatic, says Beelzebub, of an established peculiarity that if a human becomes a follower of an already well-known and important being, they appear to others to be almost as well-known and famous themselves. Gurdjieff, through Beelzebub, is, of course, being extremely tongue-in-cheek at this point in the narrative – anybody who has been to an academic conference or book launch will immediately spot the satire.
So, Lentrohamsanin’s strategy paid off and, following the banquet at which he had unveiled his Kashireitleer, our new celebrity became very well known to the entire ‘learned’ community of Nievia, the members of which, not wishing to be seen as not up with the play, proceeded to avidly spread the ‘gospel’ of the new teaching, until just about the entire population was familiar with it and talked about little else. And we all know what happened next, don’t we? Yes, humans being humans, the populace split into two opposing ideological camps: those for the new system, and those who wanted to maintain the status quo (which, although Beelzebub does not specifically state so, we must remember was likely that introduced by Ashiata Shiemash; that is, a classless system organised by ‘overseers’ who governed on the consensual basis that they were the best psycho-spiritually equipped for the job – although there are some problems with this assumption as there is mention of slaves and scamming behaviour in this chapter).
Inevitably, civil war broke out between the factions, initially in the capital Kronbookhon where, after four days of fighting, the pro-Lentrohamsanin party was victorious, and the conflict then spread throughout the whole of Nievia. Interestingly Beelzebub refers to the warring factions as ‘mutually opposite currents’, another reminder to us about the Law of Threes and the damage that can be caused by mutually destructive strands of being that can only be reconciled and made into a greater whole by the introduction of a third, unifying force. The fact that Beelzebub is talking, here, about civil war, highlights the analogy we humans are meant to draw with our own internal struggles caused by conflicting strands of the Okidanokh and their related centres.
The Lentrohamsanin faction was ultimately victorious and, after forcing any surviving holders of other opinions to convert to their own ideology, they wiped out all traces of the former way of collective existence and formed a special ‘Republic’. The new Republic of Nievia then proceeded to wage war on its neighbouring communities with the intention of forcing on them its new concept of state organisation.
The result of all this was renewed internecine warfare on a grand scale, something that had been virtually eradicated as a result of the changes wrought by Ashiata Shiemash, and the gradual destruction in individuals of the waking objective conscious that the Messenger from on High had so painstakingly found a means and system of re-enlivening.
And so Asia descended into a merry-go-round of individual communities trying out all sorts of successive ‘inner-state-organisation’ (and I am tempted to take this as a metaphor for an individual human who, having ‘got half way there’, as it were, with inner development, regresses somewhat and tries out all manner of weird and wonderful short cuts to enlightenment, none of which really work, and all of which cede place to the next fad).
All, though, was not yet lost. Beelzebub reports that some beings in the new Asian communities still held onto Ashiata Shamash’s teachings and continued to ‘be’ according to the waking-objective-conscious the messenger’s teachings had awakened in them as an inalienable part of their everyday existence.
But it couldn’t last forever. Fast forward to the great enclave of ‘learned men’ that Beelzebub attended (see Chapter 16 The Fifth Flight to Earth) a couple of hundred years after Lentrohamsanin had been born, and the arrival there of none other than Lentrohamsanin’s great-grandson (now a ‘learned man’ himself) bearing a papyrus replica of the infamous Kashireitleer that had caused so much damage back in the day.
During one of the last general assembly debates of the enclave, this descendant of Lentrohamsanin read out the theory dreamt up by his great-grandfather with the result that the entire focus of everyone there abruptly shifted from the original question of what happens to the soul after death, to the topic of politics. The new ‘fad’ spread like wildfire throughout Babylon and the remainder of the enclave was spent discussing various forms of government – both those that had already been tried out and those that it was thought should be tried out – and it was all done with almost every ‘learned man’ carrying around with them a copy of Lentrohamsanin’s theory in their pocket. Again, it’s easy enough to identify what Gurdjieff is poking fun at here (the European revolutions – in particular the Russian one – and the carryings on at various academic establishments and societies) but we mustn’t lose sight of the metaphor as it pertains to the individual and our intellectual and emotional ‘skittishness’ as we butterfly from one temporary focus to the next, influenced by the latest fads and fashions.
Anyway, the learned chaps in Babylon carried on debating this treatise on political ideology for several more months, and you’ll never guess what happened next . . . yes, they schismed into two factions: the Neomothists and the Paleomothists. Each faction attracted adherents from amongst the ordinary population of Babylon and the whole thing would once again have descended into civil war had the Persian king not got wind of what was going on and, as Beelzebub amusingly puts it, ‘cracked them on their learned noddles’. The king dealt with the problem in short order, executing some of the learned beings, and imprisoning or exiling many others. Only those who had got involved in the controversy because they were demonstrably insane were spared and sent back to their own countries, and any learned being who was found not to have participated in it at all was also returned home, but with full honour.
So, the situation now, continues Beelzebub, was that the whole planet was playing host to learned beings who had spent a considerable time being exposed to the two ‘burning’ dilemmas discussed at the enclave in Babylon; namely, what happens to the soul after death, and what was the best form of ‘inner-communal-organisation’. The result was that very soon – and very predictably – civil wars broke out all over Asia involving mass death and destruction and further thinning the ranks of any beings that still tried to live according to the tenets of Ashiata Shiemash; and yet, some communities and individuals did survive, doing their best to live and ‘be’ according to that messenger’s system. But even those die-hards only lasted for another 150 odd years.
The conflicts in Asia eventually spilled out into neighbouring Europe, and in 334 BCE, the ‘arch-vainglorious Greek’ (as Beelzebub calls him) Alexander of Macedon, invaded the Persian Empire, swept across its length and breadth and obliterated any remaining trace of the teachings of Ashiata Shiemash. It was as if that holy messenger who organised a system of communal living based on the exercise of Waking-Objective-Reason, had never existed. Interestingly, the perception of Alexander as a destructive psychopath, was also shared by the Romans. They saw him as a marauding, mass-murdering lunatic, completely bereft of any rationality whatsoever, a man whose reason was entirely overwhelmed by his passions. And that is something that we, too, must take on board, because what Gurdjieff, through Beelzebub, is getting across here, is, on one level, precisely that. The whole Ashiata Shiemash story is a warning about what happens when one or more of your three centres gets out of control. The physical destruction and emotional lunacy of war were, in the case of many of Asia’s communities, brought about by an intellectual process gone bad. What happened in Nievia and Babylon and all across Asia is also happening within each and every one of us. Unless we can balance and harmonise and objectively rationalise everything we ‘are’, it will all end up in one hot mess.
Back to the text, and Beelzebub, having expounded at length about how Ashiata Shiemash’s system was wrecked, now zeroes in on Lentrohamsanin and the label of Hasnamuss that has been derogatorily hung on him by our narrator. And this is where the whole thing gets really, really interesting, because we are finally going to be told how this three-layer body thing – physical/astral/soul – actually works. Hang on to your hats!
So, according to Beelzebub, a Hasnamuss is a being in whose individual make-up a “certain something” (Beelzebub’s term) gains a foothold that impacts on how that individual transforms energy for both the upkeep of the physical body and, importantly, the creation (or ‘coating’) of the higher-being bodies.
True to the Law of Sevens (or, in Gurdjieff’s terminology, the Heptaparaparshinokh) in its function concerning cause and effect, this “certain something” blends with the crystallisation (or psycho-spiritual impact) of ‘Naloo-osnian-impulses’ which are not very pleasant character traits, and of which there are seven aspects which Beelzebub describes as follows:
(1) Every kind of depravity, conscious as well as unconscious.
(2) The feeling of self-satisfaction from leading others astray.
(3) The irresistible inclination to destroy the existence of other breathing creatures.
(4) The urge to become free from the necessity of actualising the being-efforts demanded by Nature.
(5) The attempt by every kind of artificiality to conceal from others what in their opinion are one’s physical defects.
(6) The calm self-contentment in the use of what is not personally deserved.
(7) The striving to be not what one is.
And as if that’s not bad enough, the “certain something”, besides being capable of generating bad karma for an individual, if let off its leash because the individual is not making the effort to keep a lid on it, can be contagious and ‘infect’ other individuals with whom it comes into contact.
Now, this relates back to what I was saying earlier on in this and also some previous posts. The laws that govern the universe (The Laws of Threes and Sevens amongst them) are fixed and inexorable, neither good nor bad in and of themselves. They are blueprints, processes – tools if you like – there to do a job within the greater machine. These “Naloo-osnian-impulses” are a case in point – they are pretty ugly ways of conducting oneself, and yet they obey, and conform to, the Law of Sevens. The point is that the raw energy is there to be converted by you. It’s how you use it that matters. So, what I think Gurdjieff, through Beelzebub, is illustrating here, is that the Multiverse provides us with the means (which we may or may not use) to coat ourselves with higher-being bodies but the end result, the quality of those bodies, is dictated by how we have gone about the coating process. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the ‘friction’ which creates the energy-fuel to coat ourselves with higher-being bodies must be consciously engendered, but you can consciously engender something with good, bad, even neutral, intent.
Right, I’m getting a bit ahead of myself now, so let’s take a step back and listen as Beelzebub explains to his grandson Hassein that there are four different types of Hasnamuss individuals. And at this point, we really do need to sit up and take note, because this is kind of what it’s all about.
The first type of Hasnamuss is a three-brained being in whom the “certain something” has taken root but who has never made the effort to coat its higher-being bodies by consciously transforming energy. On physical death (Gurdjieff’s Sacred Rascooarno) this being is ‘destroyed forever’. We’ve spoken about this before. In terms of the greater machine, the being is a dead-end, useless to the needs of the All and Everything. A failed experiment, Goodnight Vienna!
The second type of Hasnamuss is incredibly interesting. This being, despite the “certain something” having taken root in them, has managed to coat themselves with the body Kesdjan (which we’ll call the astral body for now) thereby acquiring the property of Toorinoorino, which implies non-decomposition of the body Kesdjan on that planet on which it arose. Beelzebub says that this being ‘has to exist, by being formed again and again in a certain way, such as he is,’ until the “certain something” has been eliminated. Does this mean that the astral body of this being becomes physically reincarnated until it sorts itself out? We’ll talk about that later.
The third type of Hasnamuss is one who, despite still carrying around the “certain something” has succeeded in coating themselves with not just the body Kesdjan, but also the highest-being body (which we’ll call the soul). This being also possesses the Toorinoorino quality of non-decomposition but, being a step up from the second type of Hasnamuss, is free to work out the “certain something” on other planets in the multiverse, designed for that very purpose.
And, finally, the fourth type of Hasnamuss is the same as the third type except for one crucial difference. This type is incapable of ever working off the pernicious “certain something” and, for that reason, Beelzebub calls it an Eternal-Hasnamuss-Individual.
For each category of Hasnamuss, continues Beelzebub, the “certain something” not only results in retaliatory karma, but it also impacts on the way that the three strands of the Okidanokh have developed (or not) within them vis-à-vis their responsibilities to become rationally objective beings. Each category is affected differently, dependant on how far down the road of self-change (good or bad) they have managed to travel. Once more, Beelzebub goes through the four types of Hasnamuss in order to illustrate what, exactly, this means:
The way that the “certain something” affects the first type – the ones who have done little or no work on themselves and therefore failed to coat any upper-being bodies – is by causing death (or the ‘sacred Rascooarno’ as Beelzebub puts it) in stages; that is, first the function of one of the three centres (we’ll continue referring to them as the physical, emotional, intellectual for now) ceases, followed by the second, and then, finally the third, at which point the sacred Rascooarno is complete (this is in contrast to a normal three-brained being, in whom approaching death involves all three centres shutting down simultaneously). Now, considering that degenerative mental diseases have only been the focus of serious medical research since the 1970s, there is a lot to consider here. Is Gurdjieff implying that those humans who do not manage to coat their physical bodies with a body Kesdjan or a soul and have within themselves that “certain something” as exemplified by the serious personality flaws listed above, are more prone, according to cosmic law, to things like Alzheimers, Stroke, Paralysis, Sociopathy, than others? I wouldn’t know without asking him, but it’s an interesting, if extremely uncomfortable, thought, isn’t it? Another issue with this type of individual, is that, again because of the presence of the “certain something”, the total disintegration of the being is slowed down by “the inextinguishable action – only lessened in proportion to the violization of the active elements – of the mentioned sensed-impulses (the bad stuff caused by the presence of the certain something) he had during life”, which sounds like a load of gobbledygook, but we’ll have ago at unravelling it later in this post.
Onto the second type of Hasnamuss (the ones who have managed to develop a body Kesdjan despite having the “certain something” causing havoc within them). And this is where it gets extremely interesting. So, a human three-brained being that has a Kesdjan/astral body and is still subject to the influence of the “certain something” kicks the proverbial bucket, and the physical functions all shut down. But there’s a problem, because without the physical body, this surviving astral form is unable to take the next step and develop the highest level of ‘coating’, which is a soul. This little snippet is fascinating in itself, because it implies that the universal laws dictate that the process of both astral and soul ‘coating’ is only possible when the three strands of the okidanokh – physical, emotional, intellectual – are in play. When the contribution of the physical centre is no longer available because of bodily death, the entity is incapable of generating the fuel (in the form of energy transformation) with which the higher being bodies can be generated.
Which implies that the multiversal ‘machine’, despite having some checks and fail safes built into it, is designed to work only under a limited set of parameters. Every new ‘arising’ is given the opportunity to fuse three strands of the Okidanokh into something that is greater than the sum of its parts (a bit like different sections of an orchestra blending together to create a harmonic whole) but the stages at which what can occur, are strictly predetermined. If no higher-being body is created, the individual ceases to exist. If the first level higher-being body (the Kesdjan/astral) is created it still needs a physical vessel in order to be able to generate fuel to create the soul. It can’t work any other way – the machine is limited in how it functions – it follows rules, it follows laws! Think in terms of a multi-stage rocket. If the fuel mix is wrong, it’s not even going to take off; but if the fuel mix is OK it can get off the ground; however, the command module is not going to breach the atmosphere unless the second-stage booster rocket plays it part correctly.
But back to the second type of Hasnamuss, and the question of what happens to these discarnate astral forms? Well, according to Beelzebub, the only possible way forward is to once again take on physical form and – get this! – it’s all a bit of a lottery, because in most cases this ‘reincarnation’ involves being reborn into, and taking on the planetary form of, a one- or two-brained being; that is, of a plant or animal. Wow! Because of the short life spans of many of these beings, the astral form often does not have time to adapt and therefore may find itself incarnated over and over and over again.
Onto the third type of Hasnamuss, then; that is, the ones who have managed to coat both an astral and soul body but still retain the “certain something”. These individuals no longer require the participation of a physical body and so are not bound to the planet of their arising but may continue their existence elsewhere in the multiverse. But, in a way, says Beelzebub, this group are the most tragic of the lot. A three-brained human that has acquired both higher-being bodies is ipso facto deemed – according to universal law – to have equipped itself to play a ‘part’ in the ongoing governance of the All and Everything. Now, whether that ‘part’ is because they are already transmuting energy into usable ‘fuel’ for the upkeep of the universal machine and are, as a result of their own successful self-betterment, helping others to do the same, or there is more to it than that, Beelzebub does not really go into at this point in the narrative.
Nevertheless, because this third type of Hasnamuss is still impacted by the “certain something” their higher level of evolution means that they are very aware of their own shortcomings and must undertake what amounts to a total psycho-spiritual cleansing on themselves in order to get rid of the infecting influences. This can only be done by ‘intentionally actualised Partkdolg-duty’; in other words by conscious, objective, and intentional work upon oneself, an unenviable and soul-scouring exercise.
Because this type of Hasnamuss is recognised as still being of potential great use to the All and Everything if only the “certain something” can be exterminated, the Cosmic Engineers (as I like to call them) have purposed three remote planets where the Hasnamusses can work on themselves. The three planets are ‘Remorse of Conscience’, ‘Repentance’, and ‘Self Reproach’ all of which names should give you some idea of what type of work is involved in banishing the “certain something”. I also feel that, in objective and real-world scenarios, the names follow a logical sequence, in that to find true redemption we must first recognise there is something not right, then genuinely repent of what we have done, before objectively telling ourselves off and changing our internal wiring so that it does not recur.
A fourth planet is reserved for the final category of Hasnamuss, those who have acquired both an astral and soul body but have no way of ever ridding themselves of the influences of the ‘certain something’. That planet is called ‘Retribution’ and it is there that our old mate Letrohamsanin ended up along with one other Earthling and 311 others from various parts of the Multiverse. These pitiable individuals are doomed to everlastingly suffer Remorse-of-Conscience (objectively understanding that they done something wrong) only in them the pain of remorse is intensified because they are advanced enough to know that there is nothing at all they can do to make anything better. And with that very last thought, Part I of Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson comes to an abrupt end.
Well, well, well, well, well . . . what on earth are we meant to make of all that lot, then?
At this stage, there are more questions than answers. First off, though, we must remind ourselves that the last part of this chapter deals only with those individuals that Beelzebub classifies as Hasnamusses; that is, those three-brained beings that are influenced by the “certain something”. But what is this “certain something”, and what about those amongst us who are not subject to its very unpleasant impulses?
Obviously, those amongst us who do nothing to coat higher-being bodies – whether we are subject to the “certain something” or not – are destined for the universal scrap heap. But what about ‘nice’ people who have only got as far as coating an astral body before they shed their mortal coil? Do they just hang around in astral form like ghosts or do they serially reincarnate as a three-brained human to have another bash at acquiring a soul thereby being no longer tied to the Earth? In that respect they are better off than an equivalent Hasnamuss who may have to spend aeons as a short-lived mayfly, worm or rabbit before they get another crack at taking the next step. And just as an aside, is that why some creatures – such as dogs – appear to us to have some sort of ‘inner being’? Are they inhabited by the astral bodies of former three-brained humans who were subject to the “certain something” and have been reincarnated as animals? Another question is if a ‘nice’ human with an astral body suddenly acquires the “certain something” during one of its three-brained being reincarnations, does that mean it will run the risk of incarnating as a one- or two-brained being next go around? So many questions . . .
More straightforward is the destiny of ‘nice’ humans who have acquired both astral and soul bodies as they are obviously coopted by the Powers That Be to help in the running of the Multiverse, much like Ashiata Shiemash or even Beelzebub himself; and that is also the destiny of those Hasnamusses who successfully graduate from the three planets of correction.
But we keep coming back to this “certain something” and why it is so deleterious to psycho-spiritual advancement. It’s probably worthwhile relisting the seven impulses that characterise this pernicious trait so that we can have a crack at pinning down exactly what it is:
(1) Every kind of depravity, conscious as well as unconscious.
(2) The feeling of self-satisfaction from leading others astray.
(3) The irresistible inclination to destroy the existence of other breathing creatures.
(4) The urge to become free from the necessity of actualising the being-efforts demanded by Nature.
(5) The attempt by every kind of artificiality to conceal from others what in their opinion are one’s physical defects.
(6) The calm self-contentment in the use of what is not personally deserved.
(7) The striving to be not what one is.
I suppose that what leaps out to me, personally, is that each one of the above flies directly in the face of something that Beelzebub has previously mentioned are prerequisites for personal psycho-spiritual advancement. The traits listed above exemplify, in order, negatively directed physical and mental energy (including sexual energy), smugness and Machiavellian narcissism, sociopathic murder, deliberately self-serving and procrastinatory laziness, extreme vanity, unwarranted pride in achievement, and shirking one’s duty to know thyself. All of these have, in one way or another, been touched upon in the preceding chapters of the work so far. They are all extremely nasty personality traits, and they are all very ‘surface level’ types of human behaviour, each of which demonstrates a negative aspect of one of the physical, mental, or intellectual brains or centres. As such, they are almost a checklist of what needs to be overcome to be able to move on to the next level of personal existence. Now, whether you buy into Gurdjieff’s concept of continued existence after physical death is, on one level, neither here nor there, because if you are guilty of feeling one or more of the impulses listed above, then your life (in whatever form it takes) will be a much better place for all if you can free yourself from it.
I also tend to think that what Gurdjieff, through Beelzebub, is getting at here, is an illustration of what I wrote at the beginning of this chapter about the energy, the friction, necessary to build your higher-being bodies (whether they are ‘real’ or simply metaphors for a more sophisticated version of your psyche) being neither good nor bad in and of itself. Energy is a food, a means to an end. To employ a very basic analogy, it is like people who put in the effort to learn herbology. Some will use it to create healing medicines, while others will use it to make poisons. That is why some individuals who have used that ‘neutral’ energy fuel to coat their body Kesdjan or even their soul, can still be complete and utter no-marks.
I’m going to dedicate the next post in this series to a précis of the points – as I see them – raised in the chapters of Book 1 of Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson before I move onto Book 2, so, for now, let’s just add a couple more observations and a smallish self-help section.
What we appear to have here is a system – elegant in its simplicity – for recycling energy to a purity necessary for the efficient and ongoing running of the multiversal machine. It operates using the same fundamentals as a basic if … then … else computer batch file or programme (I’ll explain what I mean by that in much greater detail in the next post) but, for now, just think of it as a yes/no flow chart or a design flow for a device that has various inbuilt checks and measures. Sometimes you meet the criteria to proceed straight through the steps built into the machine; sometimes you must retake a step or two to get to the end result; sometimes you reach a dead end and cease to play a part.
The machine also contains elements to help it run more efficiently, elements like karma, all governed by inexorable rules and implemented to provide the ‘grease’ to help the machine run more smoothly. Again, more on this in my next post, but the whole idea is to create an environment in which the needs of the machine are optimally met. Karma, for instance, can be seen as a tool for balancing out energies. Good deeds balance out the bad deeds that were inflicted on somebody and vice versa. These are part of the checks and measures within the machine, impersonal at one level but very personal on another. It is the machine recalibrating. It doesn’t care about you but that doesn’t matter as the whole thing is designed that you will get ‘rewards’ if you follow the pointers. Periodic wars, internecine destruction, even global pandemics are also means of recalibration, designed to shorten lives in periods when there are not enough sufficiently developed humans to produce the required optimally purified energy, the idea being that the balance is made up by larger quantities of not-so-good stuff – a bit like cutting pure cocaine with adulterated material to fill the measure – it’ll get the job done, but not as efficiently.
So, to conclude this post before I rabbit on even more, the last few chapters of this first book of Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson have shown us (through the parable of Ashiata Shiemash’s system and teaching) how it should be done if we want to fulfil our psycho-spiritual potential, and how we can still bugger the whole thing up by becoming a Hasnamuss of some description.
There is so much more for us to get our teeth into here; so many considerations to take into account, but they will have to wait until the next post, in which, amongst other burning questions, we shall ask ourselves whether the serially incarnating body Kesdjan Hasnamusses situation explains past-life regression and attraction to certain periods of history; or whether those amongst humanity – Hasnamuss and otherwise – who have developed both a body Kesdjan and a soul and have thereby broken the bonds that tie them to Earth, explain certain types of alien phenomena. Or is it all just a giant, Gurdjieffian metaphor for something entirely more mundane and prosaic, like how to get the most out of the one existence we all have?
OK, let’s finish off with a little self-help section.
One of the more glaring themes that we are asked to consider in this last chapter is the difference between Lentrohamsanin and Ashiata Shiemash and their corresponding ‘fates’. The latter has gone onto ‘greater things’ while the former is doomed to a kind of eternal purgatory. And yet these two beings are not polar opposites as both are steeped in learning. The difference lies in what they actually do with that learning, more specifically, how they objectively put that learning into practice having examined what they needed to achieve through the lens of a rationally unified ‘I’. Beelzebub gets that point across by using the example of government and societal structure. Ashiata Shiemash takes the entire spectrum of human nature into account and comes up with a solution (a kind of meritocracy) that is fair and acceptable to all, whereas Letrohamsanin’s considerations are selective, selfish, destructive, and exclusive. From a self-help perspective, what we see here is the difference between wisdom and knowledge, or – something similar – the application of information for altruistic as opposed to selfish ends.
I, personally, have never been one for keeping hard-won knowledge close to my chest. As far as I am concerned, if something I have learned can help even one of my fellow humans improve their lot in life, then I am happy to share it.
At times, of course, we will come across information that can cause more harm than good if we spread it around, and at those times, having objectively weighed up all the repercussions, we may choose to withhold or disseminate but – and this is the important bit – only after we have objectively and rationally analysed what the consequences of either course of action will be.
Right, enough! I hope to see you in the next post where, as I said above, I will attempt to summarise as much of Gurdjieff’s system from Book I of Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson as my personal understanding of it will allow. I hope to see you there.
