Welcome back to this tour through G. I. Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson.
The last chapter saw Beelzebub returning to Mars having more or less accomplished his mission to dramatically reduce animal sacrifice in order to prevent the three-brained simpletons of the planet Earth – yes, that’s us lot – from doing more damage to the psycho-spiritual equilibrium of our own planet which, had the practice not been curtailed, would have seeped out into surrounding space-time and affected the delicate balance of the dance of the spheres.
This latest chapter, entitled The fourth personal sojourn of Beelzebub on the planet Earth is quite a long one, and, because it seems to me to deal with two rather disparate main points, I’m going to break it up into two separate posts.
I suppose the first thing of note here is the chapter title. We are no longer dealing with one particular area, India say, or Tibet, so we can expect the observations and comments to start becoming more general, more applicable to humanity as a whole, and – importantly for this chapter, anyway – dealing with wider concepts which, when pieced together, constitute a part of Gurdjieff’s explanation for his All and Everything. Some parts of what follows are rather challenging. I think that what’s happening is that Gurdjieff is, in a way, widening out some of the concepts that have been introduced in previous chapters – The Law of Threes in particular – by throwing in additional information designed to help widen our understanding, so I hope you’ll bear with me as I make my way through it.
The chapter opens with a bit of a scene-setter in which Beelzebub describes how he enlisted the help of his raven-like friend, Gornahoor Harharkh, the ‘King’ of Saturn, to return with him to Mars where Beelzebub was putting the final touches to his ‘observatory’, an establishment which was, according to Beelzebub, to become the most ‘famous and best’ construction of its kind in the whole Universe (and, incidentally, introduce the concept of observatories in general for later in the chapter). Gornahoor’s problem was that, being native to Saturn and, as yet, not fully psycho-spiritually evolved, he was unable to make the interplanetary trip in Beelzebub’s spacecraft without the vessel being first kitted out with a special compartment which emulated his home planet’s atmosphere and, presumably, provided him with sustenance suitable to his physical needs. I’ve a feeling that Gurdjieff inserted that little detail because it kind of signals one of the main points to be discussed in this chapter; namely ‘being food’ or, more widely, the different kinds of sustenance required by each of the ‘centres’ of our planetary body – the physical, emotional, and intellectual – and how some of that sustenance can, by applying the correct effort, be transubstantiated into the ‘food’ necessary to coat the planetary – that is, the physical body – with a ‘higher’ body which, for now, we’ll call the astral, and which, in turn, has the potential to evolve into a full blown ‘soul’. There’s a reminder there, too, about the ‘compartmentalisation’ of the centres; in that, because Gornahoor is not yet fully ‘evolved’, he can only survive in limited circumstances (unlike the more evolved Beelzebub, who, it is implied, seems to be able to move freely between different environments because he can somehow ‘manipulate’ external substance to what he requires – but that’s a consideration for later chapters).
So, Gornahoor Harharkh arrived on Mars and proceeded to construct Beelzebub’s wondrous Teskooano, a telescope that could, under optimal conditions, magnify things up to 7,285,000 times, and with which Beelzebub was easily able to check out everything going on around the various planets of the Solar System. Gurdjieff uses an ‘exchange of opinion’ between Beelzebub and Gornahoor whilst using the Teskooano to bring in the question of human evolution – more specifically: did man descend from apes or vice versa? The debate, says Beelzebub, was one that had reared its head periodically throughout human history on Earth (cyclic fixations, he says, are yet another psychological abnormality caused by the disrupted developmental conditions on the planet) and which, according to a recent communication sent to Beelzebub, was again raging at the time he was relating these events to his grandson, Hassein, but this time (contemporaneous with Gurdjieff writing this chapter we are to assume) the controversy was centred in the Americas.
Now, we have to remember that Gurdjieff was writing this chapter in the 1920s, a period when Darwin’s theory of natural selection was, despite On the Origin of Species being first published in 1859, only just beginning to become widely accepted as a leading hypothesis. So it must have been highly topical at the time that Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson was composed and Gurdjieff, of course, jumps all over it as the perfect opportunity to analogise the differences between one-, two-, and three-brained planetary ‘formations’ and, on a different level, how the three centres – the homes of the three strands of the Okidanokh – interact (or don’t, as the case may be) in a human being.
Beelzebub recalls that the controversy about human descent from apes or vice versa had first arisen in the area of Tikliamesh, the area, we recall from previous chapters, roughly equivalent to modern Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. His tone dripping with sarcasm, Beelzebub tells Hassein that the theory was first conceived by a ‘learned being’ named Menitkel who, being a member of that social class that we would today call ‘the idle rich’, had nothing better to do with his time than concoct a theory on the origin of apes which was full of ‘logical proofs’ that, Beelzebub implies, could only have been accepted as plausible by the three-brained inhabitants of Earth because we had not developed the true, objective Reason (with a capital R) to see through the flimsiness of the arguments.
In a nutshell, Menitkel’s hypothesis was that apes had evolved from human beings who had gone wild. According to Beelzebub, we humans not only swallowed that whopper but also, humans being humans, we then took the idea a step further and decided that the explanation somehow made those apes ‘sacred’ and that conceit had survived right down to the present day (Gurdjieff is taking a dig, here, at belief systems that venerate apes – the Ancient Egyptian and certain sects of Hinduism amongst them – there’s probably a pun about ‘aping’ things going on as well). Once it had become part of the murky cloud of religion, human veneration of apes managed to outlast Menitkel’s original theory which was totally forgotten after a couple of centuries and further planetary disasters.
Because it had been so passionately accepted during its relatively short, initial lifespan, though, it appears that the man-versus-ape descent debate had become so entrenched, as it were, in the human psyche, that it had now become subject to the Law of Sevens, one of the characteristics of which, Beelzebub implies, is the property of repetition or repeat manifestation. In other words, the debate itself had acquired the energy to be able to periodically resurface throughout human evolution. Now this snippet – introduced in an almost throwaway fashion by Gurdjieff at this point in the narrative – has some quite astonishing implications which I’ll attempt to deal with more fully at the end of this chapter; but it would appear that Gurdjieff is dropping in more and more clues that if enough energy (=effort) is injected into something – no matter what that something is – then that something acquires the property of extended – or repeated – ‘life’.
On the surface, that is not quite as jaw-dropping as it at first sounds. Inputting energy to have it transmuted into something else (electricity into a lightbulb to manifest light, for instance) is a well-established scientific concept – at least to the modern reader – and we all know that a quarrel or fight lasts only as long as energy is injected into it; but what I think Gurdjieff is emphasising here is that the inputting of effort/energy carries with it certain almost predetermined repercussions – the law of rebound or reciprocity or repetition amongst them – and that is somehow part of the way that the Law of Sevens operates.
That means, of course, that you can extend Gurdjieff’s metaphor of the energy created by Menitkel’s theory (useless though it was) developing enough momentum (through its wide acceptance) to acquire the potentiality to periodically resurface throughout history, to just about anything. Wow! It’s almost as if energy directed to a focused end can wear a groove in the record of the space-time continuum and the concept can be as equally applied to a heated debate as to the effort we put into ourselves to extend our own being (whether as a healthy physical being, an astral body, or a full blown soul). In a way, it’s all very mathematical, everything has to balance out – energy doesn’t ‘die’ it just changes into another type of energy – something that Gurdjieff was a great believer in (bordering on Pythagorean, I reckon). So, for now, let’s just say that it’s all part of the overarching Law of Sevens and Gurdjieff wants us to know that as he enlarges on what he calls the Heptaparaparshinokh as the work progresses.
Back to this current chapter, though, and Beelzebub brings the human-ape descent question bang up-to-date (in terms of Gurdjieff’s own personal chronology, that is) by lobbing in the Charles Darwin grenade. Facetiously, Darwin is also labelled as ‘learned’ and ‘great’ with his ‘proof’ that humans descended from apes. Gurdjieff is having great fun with the irony that two ‘great and learned’ beings have arrived at polar opposite ‘truths’ to explain which species descended from which. Neither of them, explains Beelzebub to Hassein, had come anywhere near the correct answer to the conundrum.
OK, I’m going to have to pick my way carefully through the next section of this chapter as, on the surface at least, Gurdjieff seems to become a tad sexist. Well, more than a tad, actually – you could probably go as far as interpreting him as openly misogynistic. So, before we continue, let’s remind ourselves that Gurdjieff, when he authored Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, went out of his way to remind his readership that everything he wrote held several layers of meaning, and, with that in mind and before I launch into my interpretation, let’s revisit one of the most important things that we know so far about the Law of Threes:
In a nutshell, every ‘result’ (meaning anything from the creation of something physical to the outcome of an act of kindness) derives from the input or combination (to varying degrees) of the three ‘forces’ that comprise the Okidanokh (the energy that emanates from the Primal Source). Those three forces are The Positive (sometimes referred to as The Male or Active), the Negative (sometimes referred to as The Female or Passive) and The Reconciling (sometimes referred to as The Unifying). Each ‘Force’ can be thought of as corresponding to one of the three ‘Centres’ or ‘Brains’ in a ‘three-brained’ human being which can, in turn, be broadly interpreted, for our purposes here and now, as The Physical, the Emotional and The Intellectual. Also, we must remember the warning that the Cosmos is a delicately balanced machine that relies for its continued smooth operation on the immutable Laws on which its ultimate purpose is based. In other words, don’t mess with the Laws of Three and Seven because to do so is unnatural and will have consequences. And so, with all that in mind – in particular the bit about one of the essential ingredients of the Okidanokh being sometimes called The Female – let’s dive into the next section of this long chapter and what seems, on the surface, to be a misogynistic rant; because Beelzebub tells Hassein that apes did not descend from humans and neither did humans descend from apes, but the existence of those creatures is down to, yes, you’ve guessed it, women behaving badly!
In fact, Beelzebub doesn’t even stop there. He goes on to state quite openly (through the mouthpiece of one Mullah Nassr Eddin – a quite fascinating literary device that Gurdjieff uses throughout the series and the purpose behind which I’ll have a bash at explaining at some future point) that women are the cause of just about every misunderstanding that occurs on planet Earth. And that’s not fair, is it? Of course not, because we have to sift below the surface level of the words to get at what, I think anyway, is the underlying meaning.
So, according to Beelzebub, there were no such creatures as apes before the disaster that sank Atlantis. Their coming into existence, he says, was the result of a combination of two factors (only two, you note, not three): the first was what is beginning to sound like an almost endemic lack of foresight by the Cosmic Overseers (again, I’ll attempt to read some logic into the way these Galactic Engineers, for want of a better term, are repeatedly portrayed as rather incompetent a bit later on) and the second was down to humanity’s just as endemic inability to get its collective act together and start behaving like the other more developed three-brained beings scattered throughout the Multiverse. After the geological upheavals that included the sinking of Atlantis and their resultant population migrations, says Beelzebub, groups of humans found themselves in unfamiliar, new lands, where, for no reason other than to introduce what comes next in the narrative, the two sexes – male and female – became isolated from one other and were, for some time, forced to lead separate existences.
At this point in his explanation, Beelzebub diverges off into a seemingly strange, yet very important, aside, in which he explains to Hassein that every being in existence, irrespective of whether it is one- two-, or three-brained, produces a ‘sacred substance’ called Exioȅhary. He then states that humans refer to this substance as sperm, and yet, as the aside continues, it becomes clear that Gurdjieff is using that word to get across a concept that is so much more than just the physical substance we call semen (or, in the case of women, ova).
The primary function of this Exioȅhary, explains Beelzebub, is to give every being the potential to reproduce. As such, it is an integral component of the great anti-entropy device of All and Everything, an essential element in the machine that keeps the available energy circulating at the quality necessary to oil the works of the entire, elegant, enclosed and self-sustaining system. For one- and two-brained entities, procreative potential appears to be Exioȅhary’s only purpose, but for three-brained beings – that’s us – the Exioȅhary can also, when the correct effort is applied, be transubstantiated into ‘food’ that helps coat our ‘highest being-bodies’. In other words, the Exioȅhary – or whatever concept it actually stands for, and I’ll get to that in a moment – in humans can be used as an energy source to form an astral body or even a soul. I say!
Blimey, there are so many different levels going on in these passages that it’s important, I feel, to try to understand exactly what Gurdjieff’s getting at as we go along. OK, so, firstly Beelzebub tells Hassein that, even before the catastrophe that sank Atlantis, one of the effects of the artificially introduced organ Kundabuffer (the purpose of which was to prevent humanity discerning True Reality while the Cosmic Overseers sorted out a previous cock up) was that humans had started to buy into the concept of pleasure for pleasure’s sake – so much so, in fact, that it had become an engrained trait. One of the consequences of that trait was that we acquired the habit of offloading Exioȅhary purely in pursuit of pleasure. Now, Beelzebub says that type of carry-on is ‘unbecoming’ to three-brained beings, and I’ll just chip in here to point out that this passage is not quite as grubby as it is beginning to sound because it soon becomes apparent that although Exioȅhary may refer on one level to the physical substance semen (or for women, ova) on an altogether more relevant level – relevant, anyway, to the point Gurdjieff is conveying here – it also refers to a much more general, and very powerful energy – almost akin to one that can fuel a passion.
Exioȅhary, it seems, exists in both men and women, so we can’t interpret it as simply sperm (although, as we’ll see shortly, sperm or semen – literally the Latin word for seed – is a useful metaphor). Yes, sperm and ova may be the manifested physical vehicles for it, but I think that we need to interpret Exioȅhary almost as lust in potentia; that is, as a raw and potent energy that can develop into lust but, if we possess the self-control, can equally be diverted into something less ‘earthy’, something less physical, something ‘higher’. And that is very much aligned to what Gurdjieff has been getting at in previous chapters: If we are prepared to put in the hard yakka (and it doesn’t get much harder than converting short-term, naked lust into something more long-term beneficial to a being) we can improve our individual psycho-spiritual well-being. It’s all about bringing the three centres – or brains – into one harmonious operation, and the concept of corralling the passion and energy of lust into something with longer term benefit to an individual is an el primo example of bringing the physical and emotional centres under the control of, and in line with, the intellectual. The friction that is a by-product of that struggle for concert between the three centres is the ‘food’ that ‘coats’ the higher-being bodies.
By the way, this also begs the question of what Gurdjieff actually means by higher-being bodies; that is, is he really talking about an ethereal you that is not bound to this Earth and which can help play a more involved role in the running of All and Everything (and it has also crossed my mind that even that – the promotion of deserving life-forms who have ‘refined’ the energy level at which they vibrate – is a necessary and intrinsic function demanded by the Cosmic Machine) or does he use the terms Astral and Soul as handy coat hangers for the concept of more ideal states of normal human existence, much as the ancient Stoics coined the term sapiens to denote the ultimate exponent of their take-it-on-the-chin-and-don’t-bat-an-eyelid philosophy? But that, I think, is a question for much later in this commentary.
Bit of a digression there, but a necessary one, I feel. Back to the narrative, then: So, Beelzebub further explains to Hassein that, unlike one- and two-brained beings in whom Exioȅhary is ‘formed’ only when the season is right for procreational activities, it is formed in three-brained beings on a continuous basis, because, for us, it has the additional potential for psycho-spiritual evolution. And, wouldn’t you just know it, that situation, which should have been to our advantage, caused yet another problem for poor old humanity; because we had now become so used to expending Exioȅhary purely for self-gratification, and the habit had become so engrained in our psyches that, if we didn’t, as it were, pop the cork on a regular basis, we would start to feel physically and mentally out of sorts (important, that bit actually, because it implies we are ‘aware’ on some level that not expending Exioȅhary somehow ‘changes’ us – it’s just a shame that we don’t know how to use the feeling because we simply don’t know, or haven’t been trained, how to). Which point brings Beelzebub back to his explanation about how apes came into being. Phew!
So, after the Atlantis event, various groups of humans found themselves geographically displaced and with the sexes isolated from one another. As the period of separation lengthened, so the – by now engrained – imperative to offload the continuously building up Exioȅhary grew ever more urgent. The males resorted to pederasty and onanism, and the women to bestiality – all of which activities Beelzebub slams as ‘antinatural’. And it’s at this point that we have to remember that this is all just one big metaphor for the Law of Threes in action. Gurdjieff even helps us out a bit here because he comments that the women (who are more associated with the emotional centre) were not satisfied with the ‘antinatural’ methods employed by the men (a more primal and physical urge) and so used their ‘cunning’ to mate with beings of other species, resulting in all sorts of unnatural progeny, including apes. It’s all yet another analogy for what happens when the individual centres within a human being are isolated and left to their own devices for too long without trying to merge and co-exist harmoniously with the others. Without the centres working together to achieve the right result for the Cosmos, all sorts of counter-natural behaviour and repercussions ensue.
There is another very interesting comment made by Beelzebub at this point, and it’s on the possibility of the Exioȅhary from two distinct species combining to create a new type of life-form. He begins by explaining what we’ve already worked out; that is, the Exioȅhary of a three-brained male is characterised by the affirming, or positive, force needed for the Law of Threes to operate correctly, while the Exioȅhary of a three-brained female is characterised by the denying, or negative force, necessary for the correct operation of that Law. The third force necessary for the Law to function, the ‘Reconciling’ force, is the blending of the male/active-female/negative Exioȅharies which we can interpret on the physical level as the process of fertilisation and formation of what modern science calls the zygote, and, on a broader canvas, the vehicle which makes that possible, which is the energy of the sex act itself. When the male/positive-female/negative forces are ‘unified’ by the third force, then a new life is created.
According to Beelzebub, the ‘creation’ of apes as a separate species was only possible because the planet Earth itself (which, we must remember, is no less a living entity than a human being) was trying to redress the disturbances that had rippled out into local space-time after the Atlantis cataclysm. In previous chapters, we learned that the entire Cosmic machine is extremely delicately balanced, is, in fact, a colossal kaleidoscope of morphing energy, an endless dance of formation and dissolution (life and death in a never-ending probationary period) as All and Everything strives to convert the strands within its standing wave of energy into the form it needs to render Time (the ‘Merciless Heropass’) impotent and thereby guarantee its own survival – and Beelzebub reminds Hassein of that and promises to enlarge upon it later on.
In the meantime, he lets it be known that the Exioȅhary of a three-brained male can never be blended with the Exioȅhary of a two-brained female, whereas the Exioȅhary of a three-brained female can, under exceptional planetary circumstances (such as those that existed on Earth at the time that Atlantis sank) be blended with a two-brained male but – and this is important – when that happens, the three-brained female’s Exioȅhary acts as the Active or Positive force as the Law of Threes kicks in to create new life.
So what on Earth’s all that about then? Well, we’ve all heard about certain species of fish – clownfish, wrasse, moray eels and gobies amongst them – that change sex when the normal energy of the hierarchy in which they function is disturbed (some, like the clownfish, are headed up by a dominant female upon whose death the dominant male in the group changes sex to take over – others, like the Kobudai, a type of wrasse, change sex from female to male in order to challenge the current ‘leader’ thereby ensuring the group is always led by the strongest and most able male) so I reckon we need, once again, to look at what Gurdjieff is saying in terms of ‘energy’ rather than gender. I think that we need to lose the labels in order to get at the gist, which, for this part of the chapter, could go something like this:
It seems to me that, in terms of pure energy, the multiverse – the All and Everything – must always strive to redistribute the energy available in any given ‘transaction’ (be it the sex act, a chemical reaction, the outcome of an argument) to whatever configuration is most advantageous for the continuing function of the cosmic machine itself, even – and I think this bit is quite important – when the best available configuration in certain situations (such as three-brained females mating with two-brained males of other species) is not ideal. I think that what Gurdjieff is hinting at here is that a fundamental law of the Cosmos is that, in any situation, it tends to what is best for its own survival even when the ingredients are not, ultimately, going to prove fit for purpose. Simply put, it’s a machine, trying to work how it’s been pre-programmed. It knows what it has to do and goes through the motions each time, but the quality of the end product depends on the amount and exactness of the ingredients available. It’s a bit like the wine making process in a way – when the correct ingredients are combined and processed in the way the winemaker knows will keep his vineyard running, you get a good vintage. If not, you end up with vinegar and the place goes out of business. Crikey! There are all sorts of reasons why that consideration should make us sit up, smell the roses and look at the world in a whole new light. If you understand, truly understand, how the Law of Threes works – and we don’t, fully, as yet because Gurdjieff is still unfolding its intricacies as the chapters progress – life becomes a lot less complicated and confusing.
Another short but necessary digression there I’m afraid, but let’s get back to Beelzebub’s narration to Hassein, and the explanation that, because apes had originated in the union of female human Exioȅhary with, we learn, the Exioȅhary from some kind of quadruped, various different species of ape arose in all of which can be found, if I interpret it correctly, the physical and motor attributes of their two-brained quadruped antecedents alongside the psychic ‘features’ of a three-brained female. Beelzebub further informs Hassein that the communication he had recently received also revealed that a scientific expedition to Africa was currently underway in order to procure a number of apes for experimental purposes. Amusingly, he predicts that the experiments will go swimmingly – but only because the apes, being fond of ‘titillation’, would enter into the spirit of things and treat the whole thing as a bit of a lark – apes aping the humans, as it were.
The first half of this chapter concludes with Beelzebub explaining to his grandson that the communications he receives about affairs on Earth come from both the being from his own tribe that he left in charge of affairs on Mars with its marvellous observatory and Teskooano, and also reports from three other beings of Beelzebub’s tribe who had undertaken to remain on Earth and all three of whom were occupied in professions ‘indispensable for everyone existing there under the prevailing conditions’: One was an undertaker, another a matchmaker and divorce specialist, and the third a money exchange agent. Most amusing, Master Gurdjieff!
Right, I’m going to stop at this point in the chapter and attempt to sum up what I think might be going on with all this.
This chapter, I believe, takes the concept of The Law of Threes and its attendant three strands of the Okidanokh a little step further than in previous chapters as it explains in slightly more detail why those three strands (or forces, or energies) need to combine in a certain way, and what can go wrong if they don’t. As always, we’re offered several different vantage points to help us get our heads around the whole thing.
On one level, we’re reminded that at the creation (=birth) of three-brained beings such as ourselves, the three strand-energies of the Okidnokh ‘split’ into discreet centres, and our mission – if we should choose to accept it – is to bring them all back into one harmonious balance in order to evolve as individual ‘entities’ within the cosmic machine. If we don’t bother to even try, well then, it’s goodnight Vienna to us as that particular temporary agglomeration of energies that formed a person for a short while.
On another level, we’re shown – through the parable of procreation – that the three energies that constitute the Okidanokh must be brought together under the correct conditions in order for the Law of Threes to work its magic in the manner that the Cosmos demands for its continued existence. This is an absolute, a non-negotiable if All and Everything is to carry on working and nullify the entropy that Time (the Merciless Heropass) will bring to bear if the energy within the closed system is not continually recycled – upcycled is a better word for it. If the energies of the Okidanokh are not brought into concert – if, for instance, only two are conjoined, or the energies are somehow imbalanced at the time of attempted fusion (such as during bestiality) – then the result is, as Gurdjieff says, anti-natural. On a quick aside, here, the Greek myth of the Minotaur is another metaphor of the same ilk; that is, the union of Pasiphae with a bull which bred a monster with unnatural appetites is just another way of demonstrating how energy (or a combination of energies and passions), if not properly directed, can be twisted into something terrible. Minotaurs, werewolves, vampires, even apes (which, in my opinion, is Gurdjieff twisting the contemporary debate about evolution to his own purposes) – all of these things are simply allegorical representations of the distortion to normality that comes about when we do not function correctly as human beings (and you can, if you feel so inclined, extend the concept of ‘normality’ here out from a purely individual level and define it as the ‘behaviour demanded of humanity for the correct functioning of the Cosmos for its own survival’).
And don’t forget, too, that Gurdjieff also seems to be warning us that there is no ‘hard and fast’ here. Just because the Law of Threes needs to work perfectly for the cosmic anti-entropy machine to keep running, it is not always possible for that optimum outcome to eventuate in every situation. Like any ‘blueprint’ or plan (and the Law of Threes is, on one level, simply that, a set of instructions) you’re sometimes going to be missing a screw or a vital part and will end up cobbling together what you can under the circumstances even if it’s not going to do the job for which it was ideally intended. The intention, the idea of what needs to be achieved is still latent within the blueprint but you may not have the tools and/or materials to build what it demands. And therein lays the warning. If you, as a temporary repository for the three strands of the Okidanokh, are not going to follow the instructions and combine the bits in the box according to the correct blueprint, then what you ‘construct’ will not be fit for purpose and will fall apart back into its component bits and pieces in pretty short order.
Gurdjieff’s introduction, at this point in the work, of Exioȅhary, is an additional ingredient, an extra step to add to our understanding of how everything fits together. I think it’s what Exioȅhary actually symbolises within the workings of the Law of Threes that really matters here. At the physical level, it’s the creation of new life as another option for the ‘machine’ to continue – a serial ‘probing’ of the potential latent in every new human being to develop the way the Cosmos needs it to for its own survival. It’s actually a very elegant system; if one three-brained being fails to realise its own psycho-spiritual potential (and is, therefore, useless to the ongoing function of All and Everything) the system, via The Law of Threes, at least allows for it to create a new life, a new ‘formation’, in which that potential has a chance to develop into a vessel in which the desired energy quality is achieved.
And related to that concept, I think, is Gurdjieff’s portrayal of the Cosmic Overseers as serial cock-up artists. I think that their repeated attempts at getting Earth ‘right’ is illustrative of the point that the rules, the mechanics of the Cosmos – The Law of Threes amongst them – are not designed to achieve a perfect outcome every time. That is simply not their remit. The Multiverse is not a perfect operation and we should not, therefore, expect perfection from its unfolding. Sometimes the Cosmos has to simply ‘make do’ with what is presented to it during any given transaction. If I, for instance, do not fulfil my psycho-spiritual potential during this lifetime and the collective ‘energy’ that is Me is still too disjointed and low quality at the end of it to make the grade and help the Cosmos continue, then the energy that is Me will simply dissolve back into the standing energy wave reservoir and be redistributed elsewhere in the hope that a more suitable ‘host’ will arise elsewhere in time or space. If, on the other hand, the energy that is Me passes muster and I have managed to refine it and myself into an astral body or soul (however you want to interpret those terms) then I have become something that the Cosmos can use for its own continued existence. But the point that I am trying to make here is that whichever way I turn out – high-grade energy or useless viscous muck – The Law of Threes would have been involved. The Law of Threes just creates a level playing field. And there is no ‘them’ and ‘us’ involved here. Our very birth, our coming into being, our ‘formation’ – as Gurdjieff likes to call it – is the starting point of our being part of an inconceivably larger machine. It is the beginning of our function, our operation (call it our purpose if you like) within All and Everything. And if we don’t perform the way we were meant to, then we get replaced.
One last comment on this part of the chapter (as far as the text is concerned, anyway) is that various human religions and sects throughout history seem to have retained some memory about the importance of not wasting ‘Exioȅhary’. Some, like the Essenes, were very strict on it – sexual intercourse was restricted to extremely delimited periods. It’s tempting here to bring in the whole concept of astrology (in its very widest sense) and the consideration that absolutely everything is interconnected at some level and, therefore, able to somehow resonate with or affect everything else – some things are best left to when the cosmic environment is optimum, type of thing – but that’s something we can safely leave for another time. For now, let’s just say that Gurdjieff’s mighty machine is starting to take on a little more colour . . .
Phew! Well, that was a bit of a rant, wasn’t it? So how does any of it help us from a self-help perspective? Well, let’s try this out for our ‘Starter for 10’ . . .
Everything happens for a reason and of course we can never know exactly what has caused every given circumstance or situation or outcome. Remember also that no outcome is ‘absolute’ and that every outcome goes on to become a ‘strand’ – a force – in another future outcome – strands that interweave and ultimately interconnect everything to everything else. But if we can ‘get’ that the entire EVERYTHING around us is straining to obtain a confluence of energies that it actively needs for its own continued existence (that is, for the good of all) then we can maybe take that sometimes really difficult step back and see things for what they truly are.
In the next post, I’ll attempt to deal with the remainder of this very long chapter in which Beelzebub describes what occurred when he descended to Earth for the fourth time, this time visiting Egypt – I hope to see you all there.
