Beelzebub is aboard the spaceship Karnak and continues to explain to his interested grandson, Hassein, why humanity is finding it so difficult to embark upon the road to psychic and spiritual self-betterment with the ultimate aim of achieving Objective Reason and, in the process, to unite the three disparate centres within any one individual into a cohesive whole that will somehow ‘coat’ the physical body with some kind of ‘astral body’ and ‘soul’ that have the potential to survive death.
At this point in the narrative, Hassein, after listening to his grandfather’s explanations thus far, makes a throwaway comment likening the three-brained beings of the planet Earth to slugs. This remark prompts a rather amusing response from Beelzebub, in which he starts off by informing Hassein that the boy is very lucky the inhabitants of Earth did not hear him utter such a thing. What follows is Gurdjieff having a very thinly veiled pop at Sigmund Freud (whom he doesn’t mention by name by definitely identifies by inference). It is also an illustration of humanity’s propensity to go for a knee-jerk response to virtually everything said or done to it (that is, to not employ Reason) and, moreover, its willingness to follow the herd and do or believe something simply because it is fashionable to do so. The few, short chapters of the work covered in this section of my comments on Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson are a wonderful example of the sheer absurdity and ridiculousness of the value humans place on the words of academics and intellectuals just because they’re supposedly more ‘educated’ and ‘intelligent’ than everybody around them. In these amusing passages, Gurdjieff lampoons the pompous, over-inflated opinion these stuffed-shirts and grey-beards have of their own importance and prestige, and, in a wider sense, pokes fun at humanity for being gullible enough to give these buffoons any credence. The underlying message, of course, is to stop and think and feel and sense every single nuance of what is said or done at any point in space-time, and, having employed our Objective Reason, to react to it in a measured, controlled manner, from within ourselves. In these passages, Gurdjieff merely highlights how ridiculous and stupid we make ourselves look if we blithely take everything we see at face value and believe everything we hear; but, of course, the inference is that to do so makes us vulnerable and can expose us to dangerous situations and baleful repercussions.
Gurdjieff approaches the subject by having Beelzebub explain to Hassein how humans would react to being labelled as slugs, and takes aim, at first, at organised religion, by painting a picture of the ludicrous way these very human constructs would deal with Hassein’s ‘insult’, especially if he were not immediately at hand to be punished. The scale of their outrage would depend initially, he says, on whether they had anything else of interest to occupy their ever-wandering attentions. The less they had to occupy themselves with, the greater the insult would be perceived. And this, on a wider human scale, is a very accurate observation. Emotions tend to run the highest when we have nothing against which we can put them in perspective. A child’s misbehaviour in a supermarket, for instance, would go unheeded if, at the same time, we were dealing with a phone call that a loved one had been in a car accident. But back to Beelzebub’s poking fun at how religious institutions take themselves too seriously: Once aware of the ‘insult’,they would formally convene a ‘council’ for which they would be dressed in solemn ‘costumes’ of their own design, intended to accentuate their sense of self-importance, and conduct some kind of ‘trial’. They would then inflict a character assassination, dragging in your family as well if they could, and then condemn you according to a bunch of outdated laws that were formulated on the basis of similar charades to the one they were currently playing out. And if, by some miracle, they did not find you guilty of transgressing their absurd code of conduct immediately, the whole thing would be referred upwards to yet another court of fools with a grander name such as a ‘Holy Synod’. And finally, you may even be declared anathema and made the subject of prayers from ‘official’ places such as churches, synagogues, chapels, even town halls (if the insult were taken by a secular body) in which congregations are encouraged to wish that your very existence becomes a nightmare.
Having lampooned the absurdity of man reacting because of a pre-defined set of religious laws that he has blindly, and generally without thinking, accepted as some kind of truth (and, in my opinion, Gurdjieff here is taking aim at how lazy humans can be by accepting somebody else’s opinions rather than thinking things through for themselves), Beelzebub shifts the focus onto other sources of ‘misinformation’ that are taken by many humans as gospel. Actually, in these days of social media and ‘fake news’ this is a highly relevant passage.
‘A certain writer’, says Beelzebub, having decided that the biblical gospels were outdated because they were composed in an uncultured age, decided to create his own ‘truths’ that would be much more relevant to his contemporaries. Gurdjieff likes to use the term ‘ to wiseacre’ when describing the way authors, academics, and intellectuals in general conjure theories out of thin air and attempt to pass them off as learned truths. In this case, it gradually becomes obvious that the ‘certain writer’ Beelzebub is referring to is none other than Sigmund Freud and that his new ‘gospel’ disseminates a new way of interpreting human behaviour. Hot air and self-aggrandizing fancy though these writings may have been, they were sufficiently radical to potentially upset the societal stability of the culture into which they were introduced (that is, European), which was enough to put the ruling powers-that-be of that culture on high alert as it was in their interests to maintain a docile and unquestioning society that, by-and-large, did as it was told. As Beelzebub puts it, they found it easier to retain power and live life high on the hog by keeping their populations in a state of ‘hibernation’, but the new writings had the power to wake the people up and actually make them start to think.
The ruling powers, therefore, first of all attempted to declare the writer and his theories anathema, but, human nature being what it is, all this did was pique people’s curiosity, and even those who would have been otherwise totally disinterested bought the writer’s books and started taking a keen interest. Society, as society does with a new ‘fad’, became fixated on this writer and his works and his fame spread, so that anything ‘new’ he produced was seized upon and hailed immediately as definitive and an indisputable truth. And yet, the strangeness of the psyche that infects the three-brained beings of the planet Earth is such that, if questioned, and despite knowing that writer’s name and able to name and discuss many of his theories, hardly any of them have actually read a single word of what he wrote. Thus, in my opinion, Gurdjieff illustrates beautifully that we humans are, for the most part, too lazy to work things out for ourselves, and the overwhelming majority of us walk this life in a mental and spiritual state akin to sleep.
Beelzebub goes on to make it clear to Hassein that the inclination of humankind to mis-perceive reality seems to be growing more marked as time passes. He explains that we humans interpret reality through each of our three centres – motion, emotional, mental – separately, and not, as we should, by understanding what is going on around and to us, by employing all three in a harmony of rationality. Hassein is introduced to the (to him ludicrous) human trait of automatically assuming something to be true if he hears it from more than one outside source. Again Beelzebub uses the example of his ‘writer’ (Freud) and that man’s reputation as a ‘great psychologist’ simply because people talked about him as such when, in reality, his understanding of the true mechanisms behind humanity’s mental and spiritual state were little better than ‘illiterate’. To Gurdjieff, Freud was not a psychologist; he was a writer of fantasy. A good writer; but only a writer nevertheless. And it is because people are so unaware that they must unite their three centres into a cohesive whole in order to be able to truly interpret the world, they latch on to fanciful and theoretical explanations such as those espoused by Freud, especially when those fancies become a popular ‘fad’. This mad trait, says Beelzebub, is not down to the organ kundabuffer (which we learned in the last section was an organic device inserted into humans at the base of the spine to prevent them achieving Objective Reason – we later learn that organ was removed at some stage in humanity’s distant past) but the fault of another dreamed up practice called ‘self-calming’. By this, Gurdjieff means our alarming recourse to ‘dumb things down’ mentally and spiritually for ourselves when circumstances begin to exceed our comfort zones.
At the end of this section, Gurdjieff passes a weird comment when he writes that, before continuing with his narrative, Beelzebub makes ‘a very strange gesture’ with his head. Now, I’m going to hazard a guess here that this gesture (and Beelzebub will continue to make gestures with various parts of his body as the narrative unfolds) is a reference to Gurdjieff’s own insistence that information and knowledge can be encoded in rituals involving movement, such as sacred dance, so that they can be transmitted down the ages; often with their practitioners unaware that they are providing a vehicle for disseminating wisdom. In a more immediate context, it can also be construed as being linked to the very deliberate motions and postures of orators, actors, and other figures attempting to communicate (or give more information about) what they are doing, to a large audience. In other words, the physical gestures signal or supplement what is happening at that point in the performance (a common practice in Ancient Greece and Rome). What Beelzebub’s head gesture means at this point in the narrative, I have no idea, but perhaps we are meant, at the end of the work, to link all the gestures together in sequence and work it out.
We’ll stop there for now. In a way, Gurdjieff has shown us the consequences of what he alluded to allegorically in the last section; that is, when we operate using our three centres separately and without cohesion, we become silly, impressionable, and very gullible sheep.
In the next section, Gurdjieff first mentions the ‘A’ place (Atlantis – you can decide for yourselves whether he is still being allegorical) and describes Beelzebub’s first descent to the planet Earth. I’ll hopefully see you there.
