We’d better start by defining who (or what) Beelzebub actually is. Well, he’s a highly developed being who, like mankind, is ‘three-brained’; that is, he possesses three, what for the time being we’ll call ‘centres’, all of which must be trained to work in harmony to realise the full spiritual, mental, and psychic potential of any given individual. As Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson progresses, it becomes clear that Beelzebub himself is based on the biblical being of the same name, in that he’s undergone a lengthy exile in our solar system for some kind of monumental (but unspecified) cock-up he perpetrated during that system’s creative (or formative) period. Gurdjieff probably chose Beelzebub as his protagonist because (a) there’s a bit of shock value involved, and (b) I think that Beelzebub’s ultimate reconciliation with the MAKER CREATOR ABSOLUTE – as he puts it (complete with capital letters) – is designed to serve as an example of how man, himself, can beat the odds, overcome his disadvantages, and come good in the end. The major difference between Beelzebub and your common or garden human is that whereas Beelzebub has managed to get his act together and unite his inner ‘centres’ into functioning harmoniously, man is nowhere close to achieving it and is, in fact, hugely disadvantaged from the get go. But more of that later. The ‘tales’ that Beelzebub tells, and the interaction with his grandson, Hassein, about the inhabitants of the planet Earth, are in the mode of the guru-disciple dialogues so common in morally instructive literature down the ages. Hassein’s growing inner awareness, as the book progresses, is, I think, meant to serve as a yardstick for the growing awareness in the reader. Gurdjieff claimed to have written this work to be interpreted on many different levels, each commensurate with where each individual reader’s inner development is at, at the time of reading. So I guess he’s saying that you’ll get more and more out of the book each time you re-read it; provided you’ve worked on harmonising your individual centres in the interim that is: which is as good a ploy as any, I suppose, to keep your writings in circulation.

So, back to the book. Beelzebub’s been released from exile in our solar system and he’s aboard the spaceship Karnak (I suspect the name – like all other names Gurdjieff uses – is meant to infer something but I haven’t worked out what it is yet) on his way to a conference in some remote corner of the Galaxy. Among other members of his own ‘tribe’ along for the ride are young Hassein, Beelzebub’s grandson, and Beelzebub’s long-term servant, Ahoon. Beelzebub’s home planet is called Karatas (possibly from the Latin caritas – charity/regard/respect?) and it was to that planet that Beelzebub was allowed to return after his recall from exile. At this stage in the work, we get some hints of what is to come. Apparently, all the planets of our solar system – Ors – are inhabited, but something went horribly wrong with the cosmic mechanics that affect Earth’s orbit and rotation, a mess that was caused, we learn later, because the architects of the cosmos had made a miscalculation and stuffed it up big time. This ‘architectural’ blunder had a detrimental impact on the spiritual development of the inhabitants of Earth which is explained in far greater detail as the book progresses. All this stuff is meant to be taken allegorically of course. So, at one end of the scale, we have Beelzebub’s three-brained tribe who have their collective psychic act together, and at the other end is poor old three-brained mankind which, for no initial fault of its own, is struggling to make it all happen.

But all is not lost! Aware that mankind is struggling under a spiritual development handicap, THE MAKER CREATOR ENDLESSNESS sends periodic ‘messengers’ from his abode on the Sun Absolute in an attempt to kick-start a revival and get man back on the path to harmonise his inner centres and realise his full spiritual potential. Among these messengers was one Ashiata Shiemash whose mission to Earth Beelzebub had somehow aided, and it was that assistance which eventually earned our star-hopping naughty boy a reprieve from banishment.

One last thing of note in this opening section is that Gurdjieff is already emphasising the importance to Beelzebub’s people – or tribe – of the combination of duty and ‘active being mentation’. One of the reasons I, personally, find Gurdjieff appealing is his insistence on a practical balance in your life. The cadres that exist even today which study Gurdjieff’s teachings (sometimes called ‘The Work’), see a balanced existence as critical. Very few people have the time (or, indeed, discipline) to devote all their time and energy to spiritual development and Gurdjieff was fully aware of that reality. Yes, it is important to put aside some time to work upon yourself, but don’t let it mess up your day-to-day living. You have to eat, sleep, and have time out, so don’t think it’s only those who go for it 100% who get to the top of the mountain. It’s perfectly OK to slowly slowly catch your monkey. In fact, I recall a little anecdote about one of Gurdjieff’s students who, tasked with working the dough kneading machine, had become so engrossed in ‘remembering himself’ (an exercise akin to what is nowadays called ‘mindfulness’) that the mixture was pouring out all over the floor. When Gurdjieff chanced upon the scenario and found his student lost in bliss but surrounded by dough, he gave him a good kick up the backside and a stern lecture on realising the correct balance between duty and working on inner development.

A final word, at this stage, on Gurdjieff’s tribe’s ‘active being mentation’. This is no more, and no less, than being fully aware in every molecule of your being of what you are thinking and doing at every moment in your life and, and this is just as important, what has caused it. In other disciplines it is called other things. To certain philosophical schools like the Stoics it is the state of ataraxia – or supreme calmness – in which your mind is totally objective and rational and unclouded by passion or some other false emotion that can infect what it is right for you to do or think. I found a lovely analogy in a book by one of my favourite fiction authors. It said that there was no such thing as a sixth sense; we only have five, but the trick is to use them all at once. I think that if you extend that analogy out to include your ‘inner’ senses so that everything you do or say or think is governed by a total 100% awareness of yourself at that very point in space-time, it comes somewhere close to explaining what Gurdjieff and other teachers are getting at by ‘active being mentation’ or ataraxia, or whatever else it has been called down the millennia.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Please join me in the next section, in which Beelzebub explains more to his grandson about the beings of Earth and touches briefly on the Law of Falling.

So, Beelzebub is an evolved being who has harmonised his ‘three-brains’ (or ‘centres’) into working rationally and efficiently (‘active mentation’). Everything he thinks, says, or does is the result of an intense focus on the ‘reality’ – that is, the trueness of experience free from falsity and clouding emotion – at any one instant in space-time. He is currently aboard the spaceship Karnak on some kind of intergalactic diplomatic mission with members of his own tribe, including his grandson (and disciple) Hassein, and his old retainer, Ahoon. Beelzebub has been recalled from his long exile in the solar system called Ors – which contains Earth  – because the assistance he provided one of the periodic messengers sent by the MAKER CREATOR ABSOLUTE to help the inhabitants of that planet develop their full spiritual potential, has helped counter-balance the massive cock up Beelzebub perpetrated during that system’s formative process.

A word of caution: Everything Beelzebub says or does (including his gestures when described) has multiple levels of meaning, dependent on the reader’s ability to interpret them; so while you may read something else into what follows, I can only give you my interpretation. In addition, time and space restraints make it impossible for me to discuss every single nuance of Gurdjieff’s work, so I will have to skip over large portions and shall only comment on the more obvious passages.

At one particular point in the voyage, the Karnak’s captain approaches Beelzebub to inform him that they are about to traverse an area of space that is still awash with the wake of the ‘madcap’ comet Sakoor. The comet’s wake has the propensity to ‘disturb’ the functions of a planetary (that is, a physical) body, so Beelzebub advises the captain to halt the ship and wait until the wake has dissipated. He will use the delay, he says, to educate his grandson, Hassein, about the strange three-brained beings that inhabit the planet Earth. This episode is, I feel, an illustration of the mechanics behind ‘active mentation’ in that it demonstrates how to avoid potential confusion by stopping, assessing the alternatives, and taking the most appropriate action. Every experience or situation is a potential teacher. On another level, Beelzebub is demonstrating that when faced with powers out of our individual control, it is sensible to yield to the best option and learn from the experience. This is very much like the Stoic teaching as expressed by Seneca (a section on whom you can also access on this website) that it is far less stressful to willingly be led than to be dragged against your will.

Back aboard the Karnak, Hassein is eager to hear more about the inhabitants of Earth where his grandfather spent so much time and this is the point in the book where we are introduced to the concept of individuals having the potential to ‘coat’ themselves in ‘higher being-bodies’. The concept is that, although we ‘three-brained’ humans are born into a physical body, we possess the potential to ‘coat’ it with a ‘higher being-body’ otherwise known as a soul. But we have to work at it. Unlike the Egyptians, who saw duality in every person – that is, the ‘soul’ was an invisible and refined ‘reflection’ of the physical body, which was either beautified and ennobled or distorted and made ugly depending on how the physical body behaved during life – Beelzebub paints a picture of our being born with a wisp of a soul that we can, through extreme effort, grow into a permanent entity. I like to picture the process of  ‘coating’ our physical bodies as similar to placing a smaller Russian doll inside a larger one.

Beelzebub also suggests at this point that the Moon was once part of the Earth and became separated after some massive catastrophe that was actually the fault of mismanagement by some higher up ‘architects’ of the cosmos; but more on that in later postings.

Although Beelzebub states that three-brained beings exist on most planets and moons of the solar system, Earth, it seems, is lagging behind in spiritual development. There are even a race of ant-like beings living on the Moon, he says, and even they have managed to outperform humanity in the self-betterment stakes (although, this, I suspect, is meant to be a metaphor that effort is required to evolve psychically and the industrious ant kind of epitomises that non-stop work ethic). Beelzebub then describes the inhabitants of Earth as being physically like his own tribe only lacking a tail and horns (you see; I did tell you there was a similarity to the biblical Beelzebub, although the possession of horns is also an indication of wisdom in a lot of older cultures and esoteric thought).

Beelzebub then goes on to explain the further ‘peculiarity’ that humans’ ‘being-Reason’ is degenerate, under-developed, and highly peculiar, but has to stop his explanation at that point in time as he takes the opportunity to engage the captain of the ship (who has just reappeared) about the Law of Falling.

This is a strange passage, and I’m not sure I’ve got my head around it yet, so feel free to have a crack yourselves.

OK, the Law of Falling is described in the context of spaceship propulsion system evolution. Beelzebub starts off by remarking that the ‘science’ behind spaceship design and propulsion has come on in leaps and bounds since he was first exiled. There is a tie-up here with some of the fundamental laws of the universe, but it is early in the book at this point, so I’m going to have to take a stab in the dark; but one thing that can be stated is that the evolution (or change) in the field of spaceship design is meant to stand in stark contrast to the changelessness of THE SOURCE. So, no matter how things shift (remembering that what we call ‘time’ is simply the leading edge of molecular change) it must be borne in mind that the fundamental energy – for want of a better word – from which all and everything comes, is pure and changeless.

Beelzebub says that, when he was younger, spaceship propulsion – and interstellar communication – depended on a composite of two separate parts of a substance that fills the universe (I know, I know, it’s hardly convincing in its detail, is it?). This all changed when a certain Saint Venoma formulated the cosmic Law of Falling, which, as far as I can tell, goes a bit like this:

Everything falls to the bottom (the Epicureans had a similar concept – as explicated by the Roman poet Lucretius – but we don’t need to go down that track here). The ‘bottom’ for any given part of the Universe is its nearest ‘point of stability’ (presumably concentration of matter) which makes it the convergence point for all lines of force within that part of the universe. So all suns and planets are their own ‘bottom’ for the part of space they’re in. That same concentration of mass helps these ‘bottoms’ maintain their positions relative to one another.

So far, all well and good, and not a problem to get your head around. OK, this Saint Venoma person then goes on to postulate that anything ‘dropped’ into space will naturally end up at the sun or planet that is the ‘bottom’ of that part of space into which it is dropped. Still all good so far.

Saint Venoma’s next leap of logic was to realise that this cosmic peculiarity could be taken advantage of for spaceship locomotion – but in a rather round about way. Unfortunately, Beelzebub (or Gurdjieff) glosses over the rather obvious flaw in this logic because it is not explained how a spaceship, having ‘fallen’ to the ‘bottom’ of one part of space, then goes against the stream, as it were, to arrive at the border where it can ‘fall’ to the next sun or planet at the ‘bottom’ of the next bit of space. We have to cut Gurdjieff a bit of slack here though as it must be remembered he was writing this stuff well before space travel became a reality, and we should give him at least some credit for having a fair crack at it.

The flaw in the logic, though, doesn’t really matter, as what Saint Venoma then did, having realised that even planets’ atmospheres would pose a problem for direct ‘falling’, was to invent a spacecraft with a mechanism that creates a temporary vacuum immediately in front of the ship in the direction it is travelling, thereby obviating any problems caused by directional lines of force or pesky atmospheric resistance.

The captain of the Karnak winds up his explanation by stating that, although this propulsion system was far from perfect, it was the best available, and so was being used everywhere. But, because of the issues that still arose due to the universal constant known as the Law of Falling, only beings who had been trained to  a very high degree of Reason could be allowed to pilot such vessels. Spaceships of this type were, he winds up, still very difficult to maneuver in areas with high comet concentrations and around large suns and planets.

Well, there you have it: The Law of Falling. There’s obviously a hell of a lot going on here between the lines, and it’s not just good old Gurdjieff trying to show he can trump up a plausible physics theory along with the best of them (I don’t think he was that kind of bloke, anyway). I guess that, on one level, this little episode is yet another illustration of employing Reason to make sense of, and use, the forces at play around you. Comets seem to be used allegorically as almost random events that can derail your ability to think rationally, and the Law of Falling itself is demonstrative of the immutability of cosmic law within which we have the ability to exercise some free will (as this Saint Venoma person did). There’s also the implication that the more sophisticated the spaceship (= the more spiritually developed the person), the greater the need for a pilot with high-level reasoning ability (= the more Reason must be deployed to think and act correctly). Well, that’s what I reckon, but it could be all hogwash. Feel free to contact me if you can make more sense of it.

OK, this passage closes with the ship’s captain saying that Saint Venoma’s system was superseded by a new propulsion system designed by the Archangel Hariton. My, my, we do seem to be shifting up the celestial ranks commensurate with the evolution of the propulsion systems, don’t we? I suppose it’s all illustrative of the wider point that the more we develop and evolve ourselves; that is, the more we streamline and enhance our spiritual potential, the higher the spiritual status and quality of the ‘I’ that develops as a result of our self-betterment.

Right, that’s enough for now. The next posting will cover the system of this Archangel Hariton and the concept of perpetual motion, along with an introduction into how we can start to become aware of what Gurdjieff (and Beelzebub) call our ‘being-duty’. I’ll see you there.

Beelzebub is deep in conversation with the captain of the spaceship Karnak which is currently stalled, awaiting the dispersal of the gaseous tail of the ‘madcap’ comet Sakoor. Beelzebub has taken the opportunity afforded by the delay to explain to his grandson, Hassein, all about the strangely underdeveloped spirituality of the ‘three-brained’ creatures of the planet Earth, in whose solar system, Oors, Beelzebub was for so long exiled.

The conversation with the captain was all about the evolution of spaceship propulsion systems. The first system discussed was very basic, a combination of two elements that ‘filled’ the universe. It is not enlarged upon in any depth. The system that superseded the basic one was a lot more sophisticated. It was invented by one Saint Venoma, and involved a spaceship whose outer shell was made of a special glass-like material through which a special substance, Elekilpomamagtistzen, could pass. The glass panels were fitted with sliding ‘shutters’, through which the substance could not pass. The ‘special’ property of Elekilpomamagtistzen was that it could destroy anything it hit for a specified distance and create a temporary vacuum, through which the spaceship could ‘fall’. On board the spaceship was an Elekilpomamagtistzen generator, so it was simply a matter of sliding the impervious shutter from the glass panel that faced the direction of intended travel and turning on the generator.

But Beelzebub and the captain are now discussing the latest in spaceship propulsion systems, which was invented by the Archangel Hariton, and it is this system that powers the Karnak. It is deceptively simple, and composed of a single cylinder whose inner face is made with several different materials, separated from each other by amber. The bottom of the cylinder is hermetically sealed and the top end is hinged so that it can open when pressure builds inside. When any kind of ‘cosmic gaseous substance’ enters the cylinder (and we have to gloss over the fact, here, that space is a vacuum as Gurdjieff probably didn’t know that when he wrote this book), the special combination of materials with which the inner wall is constructed causes that gas to expand. Seeking an outlet, the expanded gas forces open the hinged lid and, through a simple cogwheel system, drives the fans at the sides and stern of the ship. As the hinged lid lets out the expanded gas, it simultaneously sucks in replacement ‘cosmic gaseous substances’, shuts itself, and so the cycle begins again.

Now, I’m no engineer or physicist, and even I can see some gaping flaws in this system. But before I go down that track, let’s follow Gurdjieff’s narrative a bit further, and try to understand the obvious allegory.

The captain goes on to explain that in those areas of space where there is no resistance, spaceships simply obey the Law of Falling and ‘fall’ towards the nearest ‘bottom’ or point of stability; that is, the nearest sun or planet. But when they encounter resistance – such as planetary atmosphere or whatever, they can use the cylinder propulsion to move in whatever direction they want. The denser the resistance substance, says the captain, the more powerfully the cylinder propulsion system reacts.

It’s at this point that Beelzebub butts in and excitedly points out that this concept is remarkably like the recent (from Beelzebub’s perspective) ‘craze’ on the planet Earth to invent the ‘perpetual motion’ device. He notes that the devices predominantly relied on the ‘force of weight’ and so were ultimately doomed. He laments the energy wasted on this futile enterprise that could have been better employed in a spiritual direction. One thing that comes out strongly from Beezebub’s tirade is his total dismissal of individuals on Earth who think that just because they have acquired knowledge, they have also acquired wisdom, and are therefore worthy of respect. He derides all such people as pumped-up, self-deluded buffoons.

My own take on this little episode is, as I mentioned in the last posting, that we have a bit of  a parallel going on between the evolution of spacecraft design and the development of human spirituality. The earliest version was of two, very common ‘substances’ working together which resulted in a basic system that was barely functional and far from efficient. In this, I guess, we see the human being operating with only two of their three ‘brains’ or centres working together – the motor and the emotional centres. Like the earlier spacecraft, this type of human can only function at low levels of efficiency. The inventor of the early space propulsion system is not even mentioned, so we must assume that the human evolutionary equivalent is a ‘nobody’.

Saint Venona’s invention was a vast improvement. It relied on an internal generator making some kind of energy that could give the spacecraft direction. Although it was capable of being ‘steered’ in any direction, it was not very maneuverable and demanded high levels of concentration and Reason to pilot when there was a lot of matter or ‘force’ floating around like comet storms and large gravitational pulls. On the human spiritual evolution scale, we are dealing with somebody who is ‘getting there’ but not yet an adept. The title of ‘Saint’ Venoma tells us that. The three ‘brains’ or centres (the generator, the glass shell, and the movable shutters) are working together, but it is not effortless and not yet fully efficient, and the hard work required to make the whole thing work indicates this person is still a work in progress.

Archangel Hariton’s title tells us we are on the top shelf now. The perpetual motion machine is self-sustaining, with only a minimal effort required to ensure the physical elements are kept up to scratch. This spaceship does not require fuel generated from within the vessel (like Saint Venoma’s) but absorbs and emits it from and to the wider universe as and when it needs to. External substance can be transformed into motion. This machine is all about the ability to control the world around us by using inner materials with which we have coated ourselves (the gas expansion caused by the amber separated internal elements, for instance). It works in perfect concert with the wider rules of motion (the Law of Falling) when necessary, but can be switched on and off at will as shifting circumstances demand. This is an evolved human being. The three centres of motion, emotion, and intellect/spirit are all pulling together for an effortless, minimum-maintenance ride. External cosmic substances (air for instance) can be absorbed and transformed. No wonder Beelzebub compares this elegant, lighter-element driven and efficient machine so favourably to the ponderous, weighty, matter-heavy devices on Earth. He is, of course, comparing his own advanced spiritual development to that of the inhabitants of Earth.

We’ll touch very briefly, now, on what Beelzebub calls ‘becoming aware of genuine being-duty’. At this point in the book, Beelzebub has finished discussing spaceship propulsion systems with the captain of the Karnak and is trying to explain to Hassein, his grandson, that we must be aware, at all times, that All and Everything is constantly changing. Being consciously aware and alert at every level to the ever changing universe around us is key to acknowledging one’s Reason for existence. It is a concept enlarged upon in much greater detail as Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson unfolds, but, at this stage, I’ll relay the advice that Beelzebub gives to Hassein:

‘Exist as you exist . . . every day, at sunrise, while watching the reflection of its splendour . . . bring about a contact between your consciousness and the various unconscious parts of your general presence. Try to make this state last and to convince the unconscious parts – as if they are conscious – that if they hinder your general functioning, they . . . not only cannot fulfill the good that befits them, but your general presence, of which they are part, will not be able to be a good servant to our COMMON ENDLESS CREATOR and, by that, will not even be worthy to pay for your arising and existence.

Right, that’s it for now. the next posting will cover the reason the Moon is such a problem to the Earth and what caused it, and why mankind had such a difficult ride in his formative years.

So, the spiritually and psychically advanced Beelzebub is aboard the spaceship Karnak and has started to explain to his interested grandson, Hassein, exactly why the inhabitants of the planet Earth are so spiritually backwards despite possessing the exact same potential for self-betterment as Beelzebub’s own race.

Beelzebub begins by stating that he has been a personal witness to both the material formation of the Earth itself and the arising of Mankind. The problems started, he says, before the planet had even finished cooling off after its ‘concentration’; that is, its solidifying. At this point in time, Beelzebub had already perpetrated his massive cock up and was setting up home in exile on the planet Mars. All at once, all of Mars was shaken and a terrible stench was smelt; the cause of both effects, it was soon found out, being the fact that the Earth, which was passing fairly close by Mars at the time, had experienced some kind of catastrophe and two fragments of it had broken off and flown out into space. It was later discovered that the ‘cosmic architects’ had stuffed up and allowed a comet called ‘Kondoor’, which had been designed for a very wide orbit (and which apparently still exists) to collide with Earth during its very first pass. The mistake was made because the solar system Oors was still at a formative stage and hadn’t yet settled down into a stable enough state that all its component parts (sun, planets, moons, comets, and so on) were in harmonious balance with each other – or, indeed, Oors itself with its neighbouring star systems.

Now, I have to digress from the narrative for a moment here to remind the reader that Gurdjieff is writing on several different levels, so what I think is going on at this point is another piece of allegory in which we are meant to take the planet Earth as a metaphor for a human being. At this stage, like the planet, the human being is still ‘unsolidified’; that is, not completely formed, and still developing. Even the description of it as ‘cooling down’ could be an allusion to one of the first steps we must take in our own personal evolution, which is to get our ‘hot’ passions under control and operate under the captaincy of ‘cool’ Reason. If you’ve been following any of the other threads on this website, such as Seneca or The Kolbrin, you’ve probably become aware that the ability to control emotion at will is considered a massive step forward in an individual’s personal journey to self-betterment by just about every religion or school of thought that has ever been. And it’s no wonder, because keeping a lid on anger, or hate, or lust, or envy, or greed, is a hugely beneficial survival trait. You can get yourself into a hell of a lot of trouble if you let your mouth or your actions run away with you. Trust me, I know all about it!

OK, with that in mind, let’s get back to Beelzebub’s narrative. The comet ‘Kondoor’ – and we have to remember that Gurdjieff uses comets to signify random acts of fate that can have the effect of derailing our senses – has smashed two fragments off the planet Earth. So, Earth is now, essentially, in three pieces (probably representing the three disunited ‘brains’ or ‘centres’ of a three-brained being). Part of the problem was that the Earth, at the time of the impact, hadn’t yet had the chance to develop a protective atmosphere (I think this means the ‘higher-body’ – or ‘soul’ – with which a human can, with due self-developmental effort, coat itself). In the wake of the disaster, an embassy of high cosmic officials (Arch-Engineer Archangels and the like) were sent to the system Oors to investigate and work out what to do. This Holy Commission firstly ascertained that the disaster would have no knock-on effect to the wider universe (and this, I believe, is Gurdjieff pointing out that we are our own little micro-blueprint of All and Everything – as above, so below – but we must put in the effort for self-betterment by ourselves. In short, it is up to each of us, individually, to sort out our own little micro-cosmos). The second ‘finding’ of the select committee was that the two broken off fragments of Earth were still caught in that planet’s orbit but, importantly, could not ‘re-unite’ with the Earth because they were now  subject to the universal Law that Beelzebub calls ‘The Law of Catching Up’, and the situation would not change until some other major ‘influence’ either enforced the re-merger, or sent the fragments off on their own trajectory in space. This, to me, is a stark warning that a lot of effort, a lot of energy is required to unite our disparate centres into one harmonious whole. Gurdjieff may even be hinting that the ‘outside’ influence that is required to effect the reunification process can come in the form of  a mentor or guru. Maybe.

Anyway, although a major knock-on effect was not of immediate concern, the potential problem still existed that these bits of the Earth could fly off at some stage in the future and cause grief elsewhere in the solar system or beyond. The suggested ‘solution’, at that time, was that the Earth had to ‘maintain’ its new satellites by means of a sacred ‘vibration’ which could only be generated by the arising of life forms that existed independently of the planet itself, a category that includes humanity. This rather radical solution was sanctioned from ON HIGH and, over time, one-, two-, and three-brained beings arose so that the required ‘nutritional’ vibration could be generated and the Earth could ‘sustain’ its fragments, the larger of which was called Loonderperzo (later to be known as ‘The Moon’), and the smaller Anulios, which, although it still exists, was gradually forgotten and has become, to all intents and purposes, invisible to mankind.

But there was a problem with all of this. It is the purpose and destiny of any three-brained entity to achieve Objective Reason. The sacred powers began to fear that the three-brained beings of the planet Earth would, upon achieving Objective Reason, realise that their arising had only come about in order to remedy a sacred cock-up, and, as a consequence, become a bit put out by the whole thing, and so start causing trouble elsewhere. Moreover, feeling themselves slaves to a situation that they were in no way responsible for creating, they would actively seek their own destruction. In my opinion, Gurdjieff is laying it on a bit thick here, as any being capable of Objective Reason would fully understand why the ‘remedy’ had to take place in the first place. But, hey ho! maybe Gurdjieff means that the sacred powers didn’t want to be found out as ‘fallible’. This is all allegorical anyway, and I’d guess that what Gurdjieff is alluding to around this part of his work is that random acts are capable of unbalancing an individual and it is down to us to find either a way of reuniting our three centres or, at the very least, of establishing our own equilibrium so that no further damage occurs to ourselves or those around us.

But back to Beelzebub’s narrative: Fearing that humanity would ‘find them out’, the sacred powers decided upon a further remedial measure; and this one was to have dire and lasting consequences for mankind’s ability to realise its full psychic and spiritual potential. A special ‘organ’ was created specifically for the three-brained inhabitants of the planet Earth. It was implanted at the base of the spinal column and it was called the kundabuffer.  Its purpose was to distort the perception of ‘reality’ so that impressions gathered by the senses would engender emotions such as pleasure and enjoyment. What Gurdjieff is doing here, of course, is alluding to that state of an individual before any self-development has taken place; that is, unless we achieve a state of ‘mindfulness’ and see All and Everything with a cool and calm detachment and understand why it is occurring at that very point in space-time, we are prone to distorted perceptions caused by our emotions.

So, humanity had an organ implanted, the kundabuffer, which, as its name implies, prevented individuals from perceiving true Reality. But it had also an unexpected side-effect in that, unlike any other three-brained beings anywhere else across the multiverse, those who inhabited the planet Earth commenced periodic bouts of mutual destruction; wars in other words. At this stage in the narrative, Beelzebub makes the assumption that this unique proclivity for war is also a consequence of the organ kundabuffer , explaining it away as a mechanism to prevent over-population caused by the over-fecundity of mankind. The over-fecundity itself is explained as necessary to produce a sufficiently high level of vibration to sustain Earth’s fragments.

Beelzebub  concludes this section with a little aside about the setting up of a marvelous telescope at his home-in-exile on Mars through which he can observe the goings-on on Earth at a great distance; and he mentions the spiritually excellently developed three-brained creatures of the planet Saturn who resemble large ravens. Beelzebub’s remote observations of humanity’s problems and struggles can, I think, be likened to that first developing aspect of our spiritual self-betterment which perceives and criticises the behaviour of our ‘lower’ selves but is powerless, as yet, to do anything about it. We have to remember that Beelzebub, himself, at this dramatic date in his narrative, has also recently been guilty of blotting his own copy-book big time, so maybe this whole episode is illustrative of the first stirrings of the wish for spiritual self-betterment?

In the next section, Beelzebub goes into more detail about mankind’s inability to accept that it has work to do on itself; why we are fed an awful lot of academic drivel promulgated by vacuous buffoons; and why we persist in perceiving fantastical notions as reality. See you there.

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.

Beelzebub has reached the point in his narrative designed to educate his grandson, Hassein, about the strange three-brained humans who inhabit Earth, where he describes his first actual visit to that planet. We recall that Beelzebub, who was guilty of some, as yet, unexplained cock-up, was in exile, along with many other members of his tribe, on the planet Mars. The story he comes out with at this point is very strange and is obviously designed to be interpreted on several levels, so I’ll start with the sequence of events, as outlined by Beelzebub to Hassein, and then try to derive some sort of sense from them. Here goes:

A young member of Beelzebub’s tribe-in-exile had taken up residence on Earth. Having already existed there for 350 ‘Martian years’ this being was resident in the city of Samlios, the capital of the continent of Atlantis, and seat of its king, one Appolis. At this stage of human development, the organ kundabuffer, which had dampened down humanity’s aspirations to spiritual development, had been removed, but its residual effects were still being felt and those effects were starting to become entrenched in many individuals as behavioural traits. One such trait was an extreme reluctance to voluntarily perform any duty when ordered by a superior. People could be ‘persuaded’ to do their bit for society but only under threat of punishment. This reticence on many of his subjects’ part meant that King Appolis had to resort to all manner of cunning means to inveigle his subjects into doing their fair share of work and paying their fair share of taxes. It was  a convoluted system and yet it somehow worked as even the laziest and stingiest of the king’s subjects had a grudging respect for the energy Appolis poured into the wily artifice that enabled him to extract from them the desired money and labour. But the king’s ever more intricate machinations began to seem unjust to Beelzebub’s kinsman and upset him, so he approached Appolis and offered him a wager that he could put in place an alternative system that would achieve the same results for the treasury and the state. The king accepted – with the proviso that any shortfall in income to the royal exchequer caused by the new system would have to be made good by Beelzebub’s tribesman – and the agreement was signed in blood by both parties. The new system failed spectacularly: people refused to pay taxes, even took money back out of the state, and Beelzebub’s kinsman was forced to first of all deplete his own resources to make good the deficit; then the resources of his own kind also on Earth; and finally even the resources of members of his tribe on Mars. That was when Beelzebub stepped in. At the subsequent meeting between Beelzebub and Appolis, the king blamed himself for allowing Beelzebub’s kinsman to take on a task for which, although he was capable of ‘higher reasoning’ than Appolis, he did not have the king’s experience. Beelzebub, however, because his kinsman had committed to the wager by signing in blood, took it upon himself to find a solution. Wishing to protect the king, and reasoning that a return to the previous system – that is, a mandatory tax and labour contribution from everyone –  would provoke serious civil strife, Beelzebub decided, for the duration of the inevitable social upheaval, to replace all the king’s administrators with his own tribes-people, and make it known that it was the country’s administrators, and not the king, who were responsible for the crisis. The inevitable revolution ensued with a concomitant destruction of knowledge and property, and the deaths of many of those human individuals who had actually managed to start on the path to spiritual betterment. Eventually, it all died down, King Appolis’ human administrators gradually replaced Beelzebub’s people again, and the city and citizens of Samlios settled back into the same old system they’d lived under before the wager was agreed.

Well, what to make of all this? First of all, I’d better note that nowhere in the narrative does Gurdjieff detail what alternative measures Beelzebub’s kinsman actually took to replace the incumbent system; which infers, I suppose, that the symbolism or allegory being employed here is conceptual, or overarching, in nature. And I’m going to have to pass over, for now, the whole discussion of the nature of Atlantis itself, and whether Gurdjieff was capitalising on the, to him, recent popularity of Theosophists like Helena Blavatsky and Annie Bevant and their interpretation of the fabled island. To me, at this juncture in Beelzebubs Tales to his Grandson, Gurdjieff is using Atlantis as a kind of  ‘vanilla’ state in which he can set up various scenarios to get his message across without having to muddy the waters by setting them in a known historical context.

It’s a strange section, this one, and one in which I think I detect various parallels. Firstly, Gurdjieff, through Beelzebub, makes sure the king is protected. There are any number of ancient texts – far too many to bother with here – in which the merits of various types of government are discussed,  but the three major options are monarchy (the rule of one), oligarchy (the rule of a few), and democracy (the rule of the people). Some ancient writers, like Cicero and Seneca, saw government structure as reflecting the rules of Nature; for instance, Seneca, in De Clementia, likened the Roman state under Nero to a bee colony with the Emperor as king bee (the Romans didn’t know it was actually a queen) whose safety and protection was essential to the smooth running of the hive as a whole. Without him, the hive would disintegrate and fracture.

Then there’s that whole thing about duty – dharma, Pflicht, call it what you want – where, basically, everything in a fully cohesive system has to make a contribution for the whole to work. Duty derives two rewards: the material benefit for getting something useful done, and the spiritual, or psychic, pay-off for playing your part towards a wider goal.

Thirdly, there’s the consideration that Gurdjieff wasn’t all about a fast-track to spiritual bliss. He was definitely not a member of the ‘enlightenment in 24 hours’ brigade. For him, balance was very important.

So, when I take those three things into consideration, I think I kind of see what Gurdjieff”s getting at here. It’s early in the book, so we can’t expect an all dancing-all singing metaphor for the path to full spiritual development, but what I think is happening is this:

We need to see the governmental structure of Atlantis as a human being. The king is the soul (for want of a better word), the administrators are the higher thinking functions, and the people are the lower functions. In order for the whole organism to ‘work’, the soul requires that the lower functions provide fuel and locomotion (taxes, labour), but very often emotions/passions (the knock on effects of the organ kundabuffer) get in the way of providing these services that are for the good of the whole, and the lower functions have to be ‘persuaded’, through all sorts of enticements or threats, to tow the line. This system works, in that it keeps the machinery on the road, but it is exhausting and requires constant adjustment. There must be a better way, and the higher thinking functions (in the form of Beelzebub’s kinsman) think they know what it is. What that better way is, is not explained at this stage of the book (it would over-complicate matters this early on, so it doesn’t need to be) and the higher thinking functions attempt to change the system but – and this is the crucial point – without the involvement or direction of the soul. This causes havoc. Everything becomes totally disjointed. The lower functions no longer provide the fuel for the upkeep of the whole, so the higher functions attempt to compensate by providing their own fuel which is, unfortunately, limited. A good parallel would be the closeted academic who thinks that he or she is performing a service of self-betterment by burying him- or herself in books to improve the mind while neglecting to eat. It can’t last; the whole organism suffers.

Gurdjieff then goes on to explain how Beelzebub rectifies the situation: the old system wasn’t perfect, but it was better than the one which replaced it. Something has to shift so that the status quo can be replaced. In this instance, it’s the ‘sacrifice’ of the higher functions. Beelzebub’s ‘higher-reasoning’ kinsmen are sacrificed in place of the ‘lower’ human administrators of King Appolis. Finally, after all the upheaval, the old system reasserts itself and normal – if not perfect – service is resumed.

This then, as I see it, is an illustration, a parable even, of how NOT to proceed along the path of spiritual development, and it is very much in keeping with Gurdjieff’s wider teachings; that is, be practical! don’t let an attempt to over-accelerate your spiritual development mess you up to the extent that you become physically (or psychically) unbalanced. It’s all a bit like that anecdote I relayed in a previous installment, where Gurdjieff came across a disciple blissfully unaware that he was surrounded by dough over-flowing from a bread-making machine because he was too preoccupied with the higher-function past time of  ‘remembering himself’. Gurdjieff gave him a good kick up the backside and a lecture on the proper balance in life.

There is probably a whole lot more in this passage – especially where Beelzebub’s kinsman lets emotions (rather than Reason) control his actions, and the bit about the power in the blood signing – and also some parallels with the recent revolutions in Europe, but I’d better call it  a day for now.

The next episode will discuss a rather weird passage all about the relativity of time.

Welcome back to this tour through G. I. Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson. Beelzebub has just told his grandson, Hassein, who is interested in the ‘three-brained’ beings that inhabit the planet Earth – that is, humans – a rather strange story about the circumstances surrounding his first descent to that planet, when he went to sort out the mess that a member of his tribe had created on the continent of Atlantis. If we recall, it would seem, according to my personal take on it anyway, that Beelzebub’s tale was some kind of allegorical warning not to embark on wholesale changes to your being without being fully aware of, and taking into account, all of the ‘parts’ that make up your ‘whole’. This next section kind of enlarges on that concept. It is a very important passage as it forces the reader to reconsider how he or she perceives Time. Why is that so important? Well, once we see time for what it really is, it opens up a whole new way of looking at the world around us, and, through that, equips us to better handle tricky situations. Oh, and there’s also a bit more about what many esoteric traditions call the ‘Astral’ body.

Beelzebub begins by talking about how the mechanics of the solar system have dictated humanity’s concept of Time: Earth describes an orbit around the Sun to give one year, the Moon describes an orbit around the Earth to give one month; the duality of night/day occurs approximately 30 times during one month to give days in a month. This also works by extrapolating outwards; so, one hundred orbits of the Earth around the Sun gives one century, a thousand orbits gives a millennium, and so on. What Gurdjieff/Beelzebub doesn’t mention is that the ‘outwards’ extrapolation (centuries, millennia, etc.) only really works since humanity has started calculating years from the birth of Christ (and, even then, in the Christian tradition of the West), which is a shame, because it would help his argument about how artificial our measurement of Time by these criteria actually is.

Beelzebub also talks about how days are divided into hours, hours into minutes, and minutes into seconds, but, again, fails to mention that these divisions are absolutely nothing to do with the mechanics of the cosmic machine. They exist because 24 (hours) is divisible by 12 which is divisible by lots of numbers (2,3,4,6) as opposed to, say 10 (2,5), and therefore lends itself to breaking down evenly into smaller units. I, personally, suspect that the fact there are 4 seasons also fits into this somewhere (as does 360 degrees in a circle), but that’s another topic. The point here is, though, that humanity puts a lot of emphasis on hours, minutes, and seconds even though they are totally artificial, man-made constructs.

What Beelzebub is actually saying here is that Time, in and of itself, does not exist.What we call Time, he says, is actually the totality of the results ensuing from all the cosmic phenomena present in a given place (those are his actual words in the book). As I’ve tried to convey in previous installments of this series, what Gurdjieff is articulating here is what, in quantum terms, can be called the particle-dance, the way everything is ‘changing’ (and by that I mean changing in any way: getting bigger, smaller, faster, slower, hotter, colder, anything) at a sub-atomic level. Because of that, he goes on, what we call Time cannot be measured by Reason or Sense. It can only truly be measured by making comparisons to everything around us. Simply put, I can’t attribute my graying hair and failing eyesight to a concept called ‘getting older’ or ‘the passage of time’ because that would imply everything around me is falling to bits at the same rate as my body; which is simply not the case: the avocado tree I planted is growing bigger, my grandson is producing teeth, and so on. This is not the passing of time as humans see it. It is the eternal dance of creation at a sub-atomic level. It is, if you want to put it in Beelzebub’s terms, the Cosmic Law unfolding in Cosmic Phenomena which are all around us and which direct All and Everything whether we can perceive them with our five senses or not.

Wow, that’s all a bit heavy, but I hope I’ve explained myself clearly enough. In essence, Gurdjieff is asking us to stop looking at Time as some kind of linear dimension as it affects us personally, and try to see it as the Unfolding of the Universe as a whole. He goes on to expand the concept out to the cosmic level:

All phenomena, Gurdjieff has Beelzebub explain to Hassein, are ‘fractions’ of a greater machine arising on the Most Holy Sun Absolute. Well, we’re on firmer ground here and this is nothing particularly new. Everything is interconnected, he is saying, and, whatever changes are occurring in your immediate environment are part of the changes that are occurring everywhere so that it all adds up together to one overarching purpose. Chaos theorists get this idea, and explain that however big a local mess looks to your limited perspective, when it’s added to, and taken into account with, loads of other complete messes in other places, some sort of overarching order and/or purpose can be discerned. The ancient Stoic philosophers believed in a Universe that was unfolding according to a predetermined plan, well beyond the power of humans to change, and their solution was to achieve a fortress-like state of mind so that whatever happened to you – good or bad – wouldn’t knock you about too much. But I’m not sure that Gurdjieff’s take on the unfolding of the Universe is quite that deterministic. Oh sure, everything’s interconnected, and the whole thing is one big machine, but I’ve the feeling that he’s offering the possibility that the ‘part’ you play in the machine as an individual is negotiable, depending on how much effort you are prepared to put in on yourself; so that you can, if you try hard enough, change the role that you play in the machine’s overall performance. In other words, you can go from being one of many tiny cog-wheels necessary for keeping the machine on the road, to being a steering wheel that helps direct it (at least that’s what Beelzebub implies when he talks about various Archangels and such who started off as normal three-brained beings and ended up as governors and directors of various quadrants of the Cosmos).

Beelzebub calls the ‘Chief Cosmic Law’ of the unfolding of All and Everything the Heptaparaparshinokh (in the name of which can be glimpsed our old mate the Law of Sevens which is explained in far greater detail later in the work). The concept of misperceiving the particle-dance of perpetual change as Time, is referred to in the book as The Heropass and Beelzebub describes it as ‘merciless’. By this, I think Gurdjieff is implying, a bit like the Stoics, that the Universe operates under some very stringent rules. We can’t do anything about the rules themselves – because they are set and immutable – but we can do something about our own existence within the Universe. If, Gurdjieff, through Beelzebub, is saying, we make the effort to understand the rules that govern the unfolding of the Universe, we can, by working on ourselves, earn some wriggle room. The rules state that change will eventually overtake our physical bodies until they no longer function and we ‘die’. What Gurdjieff is saying is that if we work long and hard enough on ourselves, we can ‘coat’ ourselves with another type of body – the Astral – that is not subject to the same type of ‘change’ as the physical body.

Anyway, back to the relativity of time. Loads of ancient writers have worked out that different creatures must have a different perception of this Heropass or ‘concept of Time’ because their physical bodies decay at a different rate to those of humans; to each thing its season, kind of thing. I say ‘worked out’, because they’d observed, for instance, a dog, go through its stages of puppy, adult dog, and old dog much faster (roughly seven times faster) than a human being. They’d also seen that same dog pass through the stages of disobedient, soppy, licking-machine when young, through alert, dedicated work animal when adult, to grumpy, fire-hugging grey-muzzle when old. They’d seen that same dog happy, sad, cold, hot, hungry, sated, and just about everything else a human feels, and so had assumed that all other creatures are exposed to the same bodily changes, moods, and appetites as humans and dogs for – and this is the crucial bit – however long their physical bodies took to ‘die’; that is, the leading edge of change passed the stage where that body could be sustained any longer. The assumption is that whether we are talking about mayflies, which live for a single day, or the Red Sea Urchin, which can keep going for over 200 years, each thing – if permitted to reach its potential – that is doesn’t get eaten or squashed, or whatever – will experience what every other thing experiences; infancy, adulthood, old age, anger, sadness, happiness, etc. etc. Well, that’s a pretty big assumption, and there are some obvious flaws in it, but, for now, it will do, so that we can move on with how Gurdjieff employs that kind of thinking.

So, Beelzebub has explained to Hassein that you can only really explain what people think of as Time, by perceiving how everything around them – themselves included – is changing. I guess it’s like answering the question ‘What’s the time?’ in terms of a flower clock, e.g. rather than saying: “It’s 3:00 pm,” you say: ”The Pot Marigold has closed,’ and, crucially, you actually think of the time of day in those terms. The next step, continues, Beelzebub, is to realise that all things perceive time to be flowing in an identical fashion; because it’s just a matter of scale. So, a mayfly and a dog each pass through infancy, adulthood, and old age. To a human observing this, the Mayfly has passed through all three stages in one day while the dog has taken 14 years, but the process is relative. The one day and the 14 years are irrelevant. To the mayfly, it has lived just as complete a life in one day, as the dog feels it has done in 14 years. It is the experience that is undergone that is important; the changes. For both Mayfly and dog there has been more than adequate time for birth, procreation, death, and, if you want to stretch it that far, all the intangibles in-between: happiness, sorrow, good and bad luck, and so on. The inference is that, for a bored mayfly, time will appear to drag just as much as it would for a bored dog or human. Beelzebub calls this ‘artificial’ standard unit of time the Egokoolnatsnarnian-sensation but we don’t need to bother too much about the terminology at this point.

Once Hassein has got his head around the concept that Time is simply continuous change and that it is how that change is experienced that really matters, Beelzebub ups the stakes by using Hassein himself as an example to illustrate the relativity of time. Beelzebub explains to his grandson that Cosmic Law dictates their home planet, Karatas, revolves around its own sun 389 times to Earth’s one. Therefore, Hassein is 12 years old in Karatas terms, but, in Earth terms, he has reached the magnificent age of 4,668 (12 x 389). Nevertheless – and this is a big nevertheless – he is still a 12 year old child with all the emotional and spiritual immaturity that goes with that territory. My feeling is that Gurdjieff has included this to reinforce the concept of relativity so that he can transition onto the real purpose of all this talk, which comes next:

Human beings, says Beelzebub, originally had the potential to live very long lives, similar to every other three-brained race in the Universe (including Beelzebub’s own tribe), but, initially through no fault of their own – although afterwards definitely through their own refusal to toe the cosmic line – Great Nature had to intervene to restore the cosmic balance. How did it all go wrong? Well, apparently, there are two principles that govern the duration of ‘being-existence’; that is, a creature’s lifespan. The first is called the Foolasnitamnian principle (don’t be put off by Gurdjieff’s weird-sounding names – they probably mean something but I haven’t got a clue what) and it applies only to three-brained beings (of which humans are a type). This principle dictates that three-brained beings somehow transmute certain cosmic substances necessary for the ‘common-cosmic Trogoautoegocratic-process’  – that’s the whole shebang – the functioning of the entire multiverses – to continue. In other words, three-brained beings have to somehow ‘convert’ certain substances (not named at this stage in the book) that provide ‘fuel’ to keep the whole of creation going – a bit like a tree taking taking in carbon-dioxide and converting it to lovely oxygen. The second principle is called the Itoklanos principle, and it is exactly the same concept except that it applies only to one- and two-brained creatures who also ‘convert’ certain cosmic substances but – and this is important –   only for the solar system (or even single planet) in or on which they arise.

So, poor old humanity, on the back foot already because of a developmental cock-up perpetrated during the formation of the solar system, had the organ kundabuffer installed in order to repress any yearnings to a higher spirituality until some sort of order had been reimposed. The Kundabuffer was eventually removed from the species, but, as we learned in the last installment, it had some nasty behavioural after effects which also served to put a brake on self-betterment. As a three-brained species, humans were obliged to observe the Foolasnitamnian principle, as a result of which, any individual could ‘coat’ their physical body with another type of body called the body-Kesdjan or Astral body. Only once in possession of this type of body, does a human being gain the freedom to break the physical bonds that tie him or her to this planet. A key ingredient in following the Foolasnitamnian principle was to ‘completely perfect one’s Reasoning’. Now, it’s still pretty early on in the work, so I can’t go into too much detail here, but what is being suggested is this:

Gurdjieff is taking the ataraxia, the ultimate calm and serene state of the Stoic sapiens or wise-man, to a whole new level. Whereas the Stoics believed the pay-off for controlling emotion through the application of Reason was to not let getting kicked in the teeth by life affect you too much, Gurdjieff is saying that the very act of applying Reason; that is, the mental and spiritual energy you expend in an effort to cut through the mist and see everything as it truly is, and acknowledge the continuous change of everything around you, the particle-dance, and let that dictate your actions and state, actually generates a substance that becomes a part of you and coats you with an Astral body. This is heap big medicine! I ought to warn you at this point that the Astral body is not the be-all-and-end-all of human developmental potential. There’s more, but we’ll deal with that when we get to it.

Right, back to humanity’s woes. You’ll hopefully recall that the first catastrophe to befall the Earth was a comet collision that broke off two fragments from the fledgling planet: the Moon and another chunk called Anulios. Although humanity had nothing to do with that event, it posed a massive problem as life on Earth had to somehow ‘provide’ for its satellites with emanations. Humans, however, gradually ceased to emanate the vibrations necessary for the maintenance of the Moon and Anulios. Moreover, they had started destroying beings of other forms on the planet, thereby depleting Great Nature of what it needed to maintain the local planet and solar system. This meant that Nature had to implement the second principle (Itoklanos – designed for one- and two-brained creatures) to make good the deficit, so that the requisite quality and quantity of vibrations could be re-balanced. Accordingly, the inference is that humanity’s life-span was considerably diminished. It’s not particularly well explained at this point in the work, but Beelzebub does promse to expand later on the principle of Itoklanos for the benefit of Hassein.  

Although humanity’s shortened lifespan was not originally its own fault, Beelzebub tells Hassein that it hasn’t helped itself by developing abnormal conditions of ordinary being-existence. He implies that humanity has become totally unaware and neglectful of its responsibilities where it concerns cosmic maintenance (the upkeep of All and Everything). Reason, says, Beelzebub, is totally lacking, and, in a passage that is strikingly relevant to today’s world of super-heated summers, wild storms, rising sea-levels, antibiotic resistant bugs, deadly new disease outbreaks, famine and war, he tells Hassein that humanity is totally blind to its responsibility even where it touches on the cosmic phenomena that affect its own planet.

Wow, what a section that was! Some really meaty stuff in there, but I’ll wind up this episode with a couple more observations. Firstly, where it concerns the wider intent of this Ancient Self-Help website, the concept of seeing time as change is very useful. If you can get your head around the bigger picture you have a chance at understanding how and why your life is unfolding the way it is. Whatever happens to you – good or bad – try to step back and look at what is changing around you. If you can also identify why it is changing, you are nearly there. And if it all looks like a complete and utter mess, don’t despair. Remember chaos theory: out of even the biggest messes, somewhere, at some time, some thing, some order, will shake itself out. That was the point of all the mess in the first place.

Secondly, I need to point out that Gurdjieff, through, Beelzebub, is employing a serious carrot and stick tactic in this section about the relativity of time. The reason for mentioning the two principles – Foolasnitamnian and Itaklanos – is to warn us against regressing spiritually and psychically to the level of beasts. That threat is counter-balanced by the promise of relative immortality which can come about when we develop our higher bodies, something that can only occur through the energy generated as we exercise Reason.

I’d better leave it at that as I’ve rattled on more than long enough on this page. The next section I’ll deal with is called The Arch-Absurd. Join me there to find out why.

Welcome back to this tour through G. I. Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson. Having started to explain the relativity of time to his grandson, Hassein, Beelzebub changes tack slightly, and begins to demonstrate that humanity’s inability to intuit that what it perceives as time is nothing more than the ever-changing, leading edge of the particle-dance of energy exchange, is merely the tip of the iceberg. Moreover, this heavily disadvantaged species’ grasp on the true reality of All and Everything is ridiculously inadequate and seriously skewed.

This passage, which Gurdjieff has entitled The Arch-absurd, can sound, at first reading, counter-intuitive from a scientific perspective. In addition, Beelzebub’s terminology for certain natural phenomena can sound as if it comes straight from a nonsense rhyme like Lewis Carrol’s Jabberwocky; but I’ll attempt to spare you the worst of all that and see if I can sift through the layers and extract some meaning from what is, thematically, a pretty difficult chapter. So here goes with my personal take on the action:

Beelzebub begins by having a go at what humanity calls ‘sciences’. In Beelzebub’s opinion, human scientific advancement is nothing more than  ‘wiseacring’ ( a lovely old-fashioned word, by the way, which, if you’ve never heard it before, means the outpouring of individuals who affect to be knowledgeable about something but are actually vacuous windbags). He gives the example of the way all modern humans believe that cosmic phenomena such as darkness, daylight, heat, cold, etc. derive directly from the Sun. This belief, says Beelzebub, is the purest fantasy as the Sun is actually ‘almost always’ freezing cold and ‘perhaps’ more ice-bound than the terrestrial North Pole. Hmmmm . . . all a bit radical, and patently inaccurate – even the most basic experimentation on a partly cloudy day will demonstrate that direct sunlight acts on the variability of temperature – so I guess we have to start reading this allegorically. And, sure enough, Beelzebub springboards off onto an explanation to Hassein about how planetary phenomena are created from a Primal Source.

This section, then, is, once more, all about the true perception of reality. It is Gurdjieff’s version of Plato’s famous Cave Allegory and its extension into the Sun Analogy. In Plato’s version, prisoners in a cave chained to face one way saw only shadows as they were cast and distorted against a wall by the light emitting from a fire positioned behind them. To those prisoners, the shadows were reality even though they were only often grossly distorted reflections of the real thing. Plato’s allegories get a tad involved to get into in too much detail here, so we’ll limit the discussion to the consideration that should one of those cave prisoners break free, he or she would exit the cave and see a different reality to what they saw projected on the cave wall within. But he or she would then meet a dead-end with the Sun because it is a light at which his or her senses would be unable to stare at for more than a few seconds, and to an understanding of the true nature of which – or even beyond which – his or her physical senses would be unable to take him or her. And it’s that last bit – about the Sun being a kind of barrier that mere human senses can’t intuit beyond – that Gurdjieff, through Beelzebub, is getting at here in Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson. If you want to stretch Plato’s analogy a bit, you could say that Gurdjieff (and I would think it highly likely that he had read Plato) interprets the cave prisoners as one- or two-brained beings, who were aware of only a two-dimensional ‘reflection’ of reality, and were probably quite happy with that state of affairs. But, once a cave-prisoner breaks free, we are dealing with the equivalent of a three-brained being. This being, now out of the cave, has the sensual apparatus to see, hear, smell, touch, and taste things as they appear in reality (that is, a step up from the two-dimensional, often distorted, reflection on the cave wall) but not necessarily their actual reality (that is, what things are in essence, what they truly mean). If you’ve been following The Kolbrin thread of this website, it’s the equivalent of the people who, when they clubbed a living sacrifice to death and threw him into the flood waters, thought that the subsequent receding of the water-level was due to their appeasement of their god rather than the actual reason, which was that the flood was a natural phenomenon and the waters had already reached their highest point. In other words, they read into what they saw what they wanted to believe, rather than the reality of the situation.

I hope I’ve made that clear enough. I guess what I think Gurdjieff is saying is that there is a barrier of some kind which prevents modern humans from seeing beyond the obvious, beyond what we’ve been told (that is, the ‘wiseacrings’ of mainstream science), and he depicts this barrier as the Sun because it has been used in the past as a good analogy. The idea, I suppose, is that the barrier can be overcome and we can see the Truth that lies behind everything if we do enough work on ourselves to become more psychically and spiritually advanced. In a way, the Sun performs the same function as the ‘Veil’ between planes of existence. To all intents and purposes, a human being who is developed enough to perceive and understand the particle-dance of change and what it portends on the various levels can see beyond the present and understand why the Universe does what it does. That is, in a way, breaking down the barrier and seeing true reality. It is piercing the Veil. And I guess, if you follow that line of thought through to its conclusion, it is also a way of seeing the future. But that last sentiment belongs in another discussion.

OK, just before we go back to Beelzebub’s explanation, which now begins to elucidate the laws surrounding what he calls ‘World-creation’ and ‘World-maintenance’, it’s worth quickly reminding ourselves about the fundamental process that determines how things come into being. Very simply put, the Primal Source emits energy waves that contain the ‘blue-print’ – DNA sequence, philosophical Form or Idea, call it whatever floats your boat – of everything. This energy wave then ‘collapses’ into larger bodies (planets, suns, what have you) and, after that, into the ‘life forms’ that exist upon them (trees, insects, birds, minerals, humans etc.). The one- and two-brained life forms that arise on a planet are responsible for transmuting cosmic substances (as yet unspecified) into ‘fuel’ to keep their local planet and solar system working according to the Divine Plan, and the three-brained beings (which includes humans) are responsible for transmuting cosmic substances (as yet unspecified) into ‘fuel’ to keep the whole Shebang; that is, the entire creational machine of the multiverses working according to the Divine Plan.

So, back to the narrative, and, at this point, it makes a rather strange statement which interprets – if I read it aright – as that all of this intricate substance mutation and exchange, the ‘Reciprocal-feeding of everything that exists’ as Beelzebub puts it, is designed so that the merciless ‘Heropass’ (that is; entropy) cannot affect the Sun Absolute; that is, the Primal Energy Source. What Gurdjieff is suggesting here is that Life, The Universe, And Everything (to borrow a phrase from the late but brilliant Douglas Adams) is one massive, self-sustaining, perpetual-motion device. In other words, all emanations from the Primal Source collapse into beings (planets, humans, cockroaches, whatever) that are actually machines programmed to convert energy into something that feeds back into the Primal Source so that it can keep the whole circuit going in such a way – and this is the really important bit – that its petrol tank, as it were, is always at the same level. The logical assumption is that if the Primal Source did not continually emit energy waves capable of collapsing into machines that made the correct energy to return to It, It would eventually deplete itself through natural entropy and, eventually, ‘die’ or cease to exist.

Now, am I going mad here, or is this exactly what Gurdjieff is saying; that is, All and Everything, the whole Shebang, is simply one inconceivably massive and intricate anti-entropy device? A bit like the fabled perpetual-motion car where the engine creates the energy which turns the wheels which create the energy to drive the engine which creates the energy that turns the wheels, and so on and on ad infinitum. After all, Gurdjieff did spend a lot of time earlier in the work (which I’ve already covered in previous sections) explaining about perpetual-motion spacecraft. Perhaps that was meant as a simpler allegory of this same concept. Is All and Everything simply a very clever way of converting energy from one form to another and back again to keep the whole from crumbling – a  bit like keeping money in circulation so that an economy keeps going without having to print any more cash?

At this point there are absolutely massive metaphysical and spiritual implications in consideration of which I could disappear down labyrinthine rabbit-holes – not least considerations about the ‘purpose’ of existence; whether All and Everything has to be a ‘closed system’ for the self-perpetuating anti-entropy concept to work; whether there is, despite the ingenuity of the energy conversion and re-conversion concept, a slow dissipation and the Primal Source will eventually disappear into a black hole; whether the Primal Source cares or loves; whether there are many, many Primal Sources, each designed to maintain its own peculiar dimension; the list goes on – but this is not the place (yet) for them, so, let’s see what Beelzebub says to Hassein next:

The process that keeps All and Everything going, explains Beelzebub (and I’m going to use my interpretations of the terms used here rather than Gurdjieff’s trumped-up concoctions), works on the basis of two fundamental cosmic laws: The Law of Sevens and The Law of Threes. It is the action of these two Laws that, when certain conditions are met, ‘crystallize’ the standing energy wave that emanates from the Primal Source into cosmic formations. So, for example, a planet may be formed and its atmosphere becomes part of the substance exchange that keeps the wider process going. Beelzebub then goes on to explain more about The Law of Threes:

The Law of Threes manifests in everything, without exception, and throughout the multiverses. It has three elements (hence its name): The Holy-Affirming (The Positive), The Holy-Denying (The Negative), and The Holy-Reconciling (The Reconciling i.e. it neutralises or reconciles one or both the others). The Law can, in simple terms, be defined as: the result of three independent and dissimilar forces latent (and often undetectable by the senses) within any given entity or situation, whose characteristics act upon one another to produce a consequence which, in turn, becomes an element in something new. It’s important to understand that this Law manifests in absolutely everything; it is a crucial consideration in the study of Change and energy transfer.

The Law of Threes dictates that  the only cosmic crystallization made up from the energy that emanates from the three Holy sources of the Primal Source – what Beelzebub calls the Omnipresent-Okidanokh – must have the three forces (positive, negative, and reconciling) latent within itself. This Omnipresent-Okidanokh, then, is that element of The Divine, which forms part of the energy wave that has the potential to become all things. So, this three-in-one energy wave part goes zipping off in space-time and what it eventually ‘collapses’ into depends on its passage through the ‘gravity-centers’ that are subject to The Law of Sevens (of which more later). Beelzebub informs Hassein that the Omipresent Okidanokh (the three-in-one part of the energy wave) has many properties but, thankfully for us, at this stage in the work, he’s going to limit himself to just two of them.

Its first peculiarity, he says, is that when some new object is crystallized (that is, the energy wave ‘collapses’ into something we’d recognise, i.e it seeds, buds, is born, etc.) the Okidanokh, unlike the other elements that were part of the energy wave, does not enter the new object/being as is; rather, it splits into its three separate parts (positive/negative/reconciling). And now comes the important bit: what that means, is that the new person (and let’s drop the pretense here because Gurdjieff is, after all, preaching to humans) has the potential to activate their very own Law of Threes process and make the three separate parts of the Okidanokh within themselves work in harmony, in the same way that it emanates from, and therefore resembles, The Divine. In other words, humans have the potential to recreate, in themselves, a little bit of God (however you want to define that term).

Now this is powerful, powerful stuff! It fits in neatly with what I read into Gurdjieff’s earlier inferences about Creation (for want of a better term) being a gigantic and very clever anti-entropy device – that is, the various conversions of energy forms back and forth to keep everything going – but now we are being offered glimpses of the trade-off; of the what’s-in-it-for-us side of the transaction. Perhaps we are not, after all, just meaningless cogs in the machine; perhaps we are all part of a very aware and very loving Allness; we just have to realise some of the potential latent within ourselves to be able to tap into it. Or am I getting a bit carried away here? Better get back to the narrative, but just before I do, it’s worth noting the parallel with other philosophical and religious esoterica, especially with that belief of the so-called ‘heretical’ Cathars who maintained that the soul ‘died’ upon its descent to Earth and, only when humans ‘reunited’ with The Divine within themselves could they escape this planet and avoid another earthly incarnation.

Back to Beelzebub. So, every new human has the three distinct parts of this Primal Source potential separated within itself. Beelzebub assures Hassein that the three parts will sit there patiently waiting to be developed for as long as that human lives. Once the human dies, the three parts reunite and zip off back into the general energy wave. Now, Gurdjieff doesn’t state as much at this point but I am reading into this passage that if humans die without having worked on themselves, the reunited Okidanokh (let’s call it the divine potential for now) whizzes off into the general energy wave with little or no ‘flavour’ from the human it has just ‘occupied’. But the implication is that, if humans do work on themselves, the reunited Okidanokh behaves differently after physical death. Gurdjieff has a lot more to say about this later on in the book but, for now, I guess the inference is that what some might call a ‘soul’ starts off as simply a ‘neutral’ piece of the Primal Source that splits into three on entry into a new organism and it is up to us and the work we do on ourselves how ‘individual’ that three-in-one energy packet becomes and what happens to it next. I suppose that, to the Primal Source, what we do as individuals is entirely up to us. The Primal Source possibly doesn’t really care how many of those three-in-one energy packets get ‘individualised’ as long as enough energy gets converted back to the right type to keep the anti-entropy machine in working order. But I’m digressing again.

Before getting onto the second peculiarity of the Omnipresent-Okidanokh about which Beelzebub had promised to tell Hassein in this passage, he explains about the concept – or law – of remorse. Apparently, once the Okidanokh has entered a new human and split into its three separate and distinct parts, those parts, because they originated in the Primal Source, are susceptible to the vibes of things that resonate with that holiness (or whatever other word you want to use for good vibes). Whenever that happens, each of the three parts feels a kind of remorse and ‘criticises’, or, I suppose you could say, ‘puts a guilt trip on’, the other two. Beelzebub then begins a seeming digression and informs Hassein that human scientists are unable to distinguish between ’emanation’ and ‘radiation’. He also, at this point, reminds Hassein to take on board the ‘mechanics’ of the Law of Remorse, which includes, to my understanding, this important additional piece of information: All beings are ‘made up’ of the crystallization of the Energy Wave. A part of the Energy Wave that crystallizes into a being contains the three-in-one thread which Beelzebub calls the Okidanokh. The rest of the Energy Wave (the whole of which, incidentally, Beelzebub calls Etherokrilno but we’ll stick with Energy Wave for now) performs the function of holding the rest of the being together; so, I am assuming, it crystallizes into blood, muscles, nerve strands etc. During the process of Remorse, all of these connecting bits and pieces become reduced in effectiveness, and only fully regain and perform the function for which they were designed when the three separated parts of the Okidanokh recombine and work together as one. I guess that this is just another way of saying that when the three ‘brains’ of  a three-brained being are not working in harmony, then all the other functions of the being – physical, emotional, whatever – fail to perform at their full potential. And it’s absolutely correct, of course. Simply put; the more distraught you become, the more likely you are to stuff up.

The three strands of the three-in-one Okidanokh correspond, of course, to the three brains of a three-brained being, and Beelzebub goes on to enlarge on that so that Hassein can better understand how one- two- and three-brained beings differ from one another in terms of their function in the wider cosmic machine. He explains that each ‘brain’ is the potential conduit in a being for its corresponding original function – or ‘power’ – in the Primal Source from which it originally arose. It’s a bit like having three separate ingredients for a cake sitting inside you waiting for something – or even someone – to come along and ‘unite’ them into a beautiful finished product. Beelzebub also mentions here that the three strands of the Okidanokh can be somehow ‘fed’, each by its own type of ‘being-food’ (a concept Gurdjieff enlarges on later in the work).

Now, back to the second peculiarity of the Okidanokh that Beelzebub had promised to reveal to Hassein earlier in this passage; namely, that the separation of the three strands of the three-in-one Okidanokh into distinct ‘brains’ does not occur because beings are exposed to large or holy cosmic concentrations, rather it is reliant on two other factors. The first is whether or not the individual is prepared to put in some work on itself; so this is something within that being’s own control. The second is the wider requirement of Great Nature to maintain the correct balance of vibrations necessary to keep the cosmic machine balanced and running smoothly in every localisation in the multiverses. This, of course, individual beings have absolutely no say in, and the implication is that Nature Herself may need to actively step in and ‘interfere’ with a species’ development so that the overall equilibrium in a particular part of the multiverse can be maintained.

So, when a being is crystallized, the Energy Wave collapses into the bits that make that being ‘work’, and the three-in-one Okidanokh part of the collapsed Energy Wave separates into its three distinct parts (or ‘centres’, or ‘brains’, as Gurdjieff calls them). Each of the brains needs to be fed. This ‘being-food’ comes in three types, each of which is also made from the Energy Wave and, therefore, contains the three-in-one Okidanokh. Once the ‘food’ enters the being, the Okidanokh part, as usual, separates out into its three strands and each strand knows which brain it has to ‘feed’ because it senses the ‘kindred vibration’ calling to it from that particular brain. So, these three brains are also performing their part in the energy exchange scenario we looked at above. The machine is, ultimately, designed to transform energy emanating from the Primal Source through a filtering process (the ‘brains’ in beings) which keeps All and Everything going and negates the impact of entropy on the Primal Source. Brilliant! This is a truly logical and intricate machine. Gurdjieff has concocted, to nick a phrase from the brilliant Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a miracle of rare device! It’s even plausible. But what’s in it for us? Aha! Gurdjieff’s got that covered too.

Because, Beelzebub goes on to explain to Hassein, the separation at being-crystallization of the three-in-one Okidanokh into its separate parts creates an energy-transmutation apparatus which can be used by Great Nature to maintain cosmic balance, that very same apparatus can be used by us – that’s you and me – to transform the incoming being food (=energy) into something that benefits us as individuals. The fly in the ointment, though, is that we have to exert the effort to wrest control of the energy transformation device to our own ends and personal benefit. It all depends, says Beelzebub, on the quality of the way the incoming energy blends with the brain to which it is attracted. In order to raise the standard of that quality, it is imperative – Beelzebub says it’s actually a commandment of the Primal Source – that we maintain a guard against any perception (that’s his word – I think he means thought process) that may ‘soil the purity of your brains’. By making the effort to active our objective Reason, humans have the potential to develop each of our three brains independently so that they work in perfect harmony with each other. If we can achieve this, the consequence is that we become mirrors of the Primal Source in that we contain within ourselves the three ‘forces’ that exist in the Primal Source which combine into the Okidanokh. We become, in this particular reflection of the Divine, like mini-gods. Moreover, another consequence of perfecting the three individual brains is that we ‘coat’ our being with a ‘higher’ (or more refined) body which (Gurdjieff infers elsewhere) has the power to escape the physical bonds of the Earth and even survive physical death.

That all sounds great, but then Beelzebub brings the mood crashing down by informing Hassein that the humans of planet Earth, although possessing the potential to become angels (in a manner of speaking), are totally oblivious to the possibility’s existence. Beelzebub then gives his grandson a breakdown of how the three brains (that is, the three forces of the Okidanokh) in humans correspond to bodily organs and functions. The Positive force, he says, resides in the head. The Negative force lies along the spinal column. The Reconciling force is scattered throughout the nerve nodes but in particular the solar plexus (and if this is beginning to sound like yogic chakras and the ‘power-centres’ of various other esoteric traditions, well, of course it does – there are echoes of truths in all teachings). Now, Beelzebub has mentioned before that it is an existential duty of three-brained beings everywhere to perform what he calls being-Partkdolg-duty which is essentially the perfecting of Objective Reason. This is really nothing more than the ability to accurately and dispassionately acknowledge the changes that the leading edge of the particle-dance of All and Everything is making in your localisation, and take informed action (if any is required). This is a concept well-recognised in many ancient traditions and can even be boiled down to pithy little sayings like Look before you leap! or Stop and think! (and, incidentally, those little sayings are often really, really pregnant with meaning. They come with a full load of thinking behind them and only seem simple because they’ve been designed to by-pass your intellectual centre and hit you right in the emotion, where you instinctively understand them to be ‘true’ without any accompanying explanation required – I’m a great fan of them).

Back to the narrative. Beelzebub tells Hassein that the only one of the three brains that humanity uses to transubstantiate energy for its own use is the Negative force. The incoming energy that gets ‘attracted’ to the Positive and Reconciling forces is all converted and sent back out to help maintain the balance of the cosmic machine. The incoming energy that gets ‘attracted’ to the Negative force is used primarily for the upkeep of the physical body and so the entire organism, having not managed to ‘coat’ itself with any higher-level body, perishes utterly at biological death.

At this point, Beelzebub feels he can’t go any deeper into the subject in hand until he’s explained more to Hassein about the laws of World-creation and World-maintenance. But before he does that, even, he will tell Hassein about the experiments that Beelzebub himself conducted on the science of creation whilst on Saturn. But that is a topic for the next posting.

So, to sum up: Wow! Blimey! Crikey! And things of that nature generally. That was a seriously heavy passage. In it, I gave you my take on what I think Gurdjieff is saying in this part of Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson. His cosmogony is slowly taking shape. The presentation of Creation as a vast, intricate, entropy-negating device, filled with energy transubstantiating mechanisms – that’s you, me, and all other ‘beings’, including planets and suns – is a bit of a mind-blower, although you have to remember that’s my interpretation of the text and you may get something completely different out of it. Gurdjieff also seems to be constant in his insistence that we, as individuals, don’t have to be satisfied with being mindless cogs in the universal machine, but are presented with the option of pulling our finger out and making ourselves more useful pieces of equipment. There are also all sorts of other echoes going on in this passage, not least the three-in-one Okidanokh, of which the Christian Trinity is an obvious echo, but we’d better leave it there for now. I hope to see you in the next posting which is entitled the Arch-Preposterous.

Welcome back to this tour through G. I. Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson. This section is a long one, so please bear with me as it contains some good stuff. It follows on from the previous section entitled the Arch-absurd, in which Gurdjieff, through the explanation by Beelzebub to his grandson, Hassein, began to expand a little on his own take on cosmology. The Arch-preposterous kind of continues that theme and brings into play some other topics touched briefly upon earlier in the work, and it’s all done in a very entertaining way. Just before we begin, though, let’s have a quick summary of where the last passage left us (at least as far as I understand it):

Your average modern human being is so out of touch with the real nature of the Universe and everything in it, that he or she is totally oblivious to the true essence of everything around them. Gurdjieff used The Sun as an example. A human, he says, is incapable of understanding what The Sun is with the five usual senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. In a kind of twist that could easily have come from Platonic-Socratic philosophy, he argues that only when we leave our five senses out of the equation and look at The Sun using only True Reason (Plato and Socrates explain it as using only thought or intelligence) do we stand a chance of perceiving its true nature. To get to that stage where True Reason is the only weapon in our arsenal involves doing a hell of a lot of spiritual and psychic hard work on ourselves. The three-brained Beelzebub, in contrast to the three-brained rabble on Earth, claims to be quite a long way down that path already.

In addition, Beelzebub gave us a bit more detail on how All and Everything fits together and what fuels it. You can refer back to the previous section for the detail, but essentially what happens is this: The Source, left to its own devices, would eventually dissipate (and, presumably, disappear down a black-hole or something) through slow energy leakage. His (or Her or It’s) solution to that problem is quite brilliant. The Source transmits an energy-wave which collapses into suns, planets, and their associated life-forms. When everything functions properly, the lower level life forms (one and two-brained beings), once formed, transmute part of the eternal energy wave into a cosmic fuel which keeps their local surrounding bit of space going; and the higher level life forms (three-brained beings) transmute a part of the eternal energy wave into a fuel that is in a fit state to return to The Source and replenish whatever energy it loses by emitting the eternal energy wave. It’s all a big circle, designed as an anti-entropy device to prevent The Source from decaying. Although this may make it sound that the purpose of human existence is to perform the function of a tiny cog in a massive machine, Beelzebub inferred that the more work we do on ourselves, the greater and more involved a part we will play in the greater cosmic scheme of things.

OK, on with the Arch -preposterous, and the narrative becomes, on the surface, quite absurd. Beelzebub explains to Hassein that, during his exile, he encountered a few ‘bosom-buddies’; that is, three-brained beings in Earth’s solar system with whom he had a close, what we might call, spiritual affinity. One such was the Chief, or King, of the inhabitants of Saturn – one Gornahoor Harharkh – who had the appearance of a giant raven. Gurdjieff notes that only Earth has multiple kings – one for each region or nation, he says – while all other planets in the solar system have only the one King who is top dog over all inhabitants – an allusion, I would say, to the disjointed ‘centres’ within any individual human living on the disadvantaged planet Earth. What follows, I believe, is Gurdjieff illustrating the way that the sacred Okidanokh (that part of the eternal energy wave that contains the three inter-twined Forces of Positive, Negative, and Reconciling) behaves, by using the analogy of some physical apparatus used in experiments by his mate, the raven. Just a quick reminder, here, that those three Forces, when entering a newly formed three-brained being (such as a human) split into three independent centres, and the whole point is to get those centres working in harmony in order to evolve and convert energy back into a form that The Source can continue recycling to keep the whole cosmic machine running.

Now, the raven, Gornahoor Harharkh, although at that time a normal three-brained being, was apparently quite the scientist, and had invented several interesting gizmos that were used on various other planets, including a telescope-like device with a magnifying factor of 7,000,285. Beelzebub explains that he, himself, had one of these devices set up in his own home-in-exile on Mars and through it was able to keep tabs on events on Earth and other planets of the Solar System. I sense this is somehow an allegorical reference to using degrees of perspective to analyse events; so what Gurdjieff is saying here is that, being more developed and analytical, Beelzebub could apply Reason (=distance) to the mayhem and chaos occurring on Earth. This all ties back to seeing things as they really are by distancing ourselves from the immediate reaction of our senses and having a good old think about what they are telling us, before deciding what to do.

Anyway, the Saturnine raven scientist agreed to show Beelzebub the appliance he’d invented, in which could be identified the results of experiments conducted to reveal the peculiarities of the Okidanokh. The crux, here, is that Gornahoor had managed to extract the three strands of the Okidanokh – which starts off from The Source as a three-in-one strand of the bigger eternal energy wave and then separates out into its three constituent centres when it ‘collapses’ into a ‘being’ – from various beings, recombine them, and then separate them out again to better understand the properties of each of the Positive, Negative, and Reconciling forces. It’s a bit like extracting the juice from three separate citrus fruits, combining them together to make a new drink, and then using a distillation process to re-extract one juice at a time so that, by comparing the remaining drink to the original, you can identify what qualities or peculiarities are now missing, and thereby gauge what the extracted juice had brought to the collective party, as it were. And the point of all this (and I’ll cut to the chase here) is to demonstrate that, when a human being is not functioning cohesively with all three centres operating in harmony, he or she is not actually aware that they are not performing to their full spiritual and psychic potential. The spiritually malfunctioning human can, however, be made aware of their deficiencies either by a Reasoning outside influence; that is, a guru or somebody similar, or by a sequence of events that forces their attention to the problem. In this passage, Gornahoor’s Okidanokh extraction-combination-separation device is meant to symbolise both the application of Reason and the mechanical sequence of events that will reveal the workings of the three centres.

Beelzebub describes the ‘chamber’ in which the results of the device’s workings could be observed as being like a ‘huge electric lamp’ in the form of a hermetically sealed room with glass-like walls which, although transparent to the eye, were impervious to any kind of energy transmission. Inside the chamber were what looked like a table with two chairs with an electric lamp hanging above the table while below it were three identical things each resembling the Momonodooar (which we are later told resembles a socket with an arc-lamp in it). In addition, several instruments unknown to Beelzebub lay on and around the table. Everything, it appears, was made of a special material invented by the genius scientist raven (the raven’s occult and spiritual symbolism as a bird of insight probably has something to do with the scientist’s appearance but I am not sure exactly what at this stage). In the same workshop as this chamber, Beelzebub also noted a couple of large devices that he compares to dynamos and a large vacuum-inducing pump. So, we can surmise that whatever is going to happen with the manipulation of the three Okidanokh forces in this laboratory is going to demand a whole lot of energy. It all comes down to energy, doesn’t it? Worth remembering the words of the late, great Terry Pratchett in this respect, to the effect that one of the strangest qualities of energy is that everything in the universe eventually ends up as everything else. Damn, but that man was good!

Gornahoor begins to explain the mechanism to Beelzebub. The vacuum pump, he says, in concert with the largest dynamo, sucks in the three forces of the Okidanokh from either the atmosphere or some other ‘being’ (and it’s worth remembering that planets, atmospheres, trees, etc. are also classed as ‘beings’ that have ‘collapsed’ from the eternal energy wave) in which they are present, and it sucks in each one separately. The dynamo somehow re-blends the three forces into one and concentrates the now fully formed Okidanokh in what Beelzebub describes as a ‘generator’. It then flows into another dynamo where it is broken down again into its three separate parts and stored in accumulators from which Gornahoor can extract the individual forces to conduct his experiments. In terms of our citrus juice analogy, at this point we have taken our three different juices and poured them all into a single jug then poured the mixture through a filter which has re-separated them back into their original juice containers. Now, if you’re thinking there’s an unnecessary first step here (the initial separation of the Okidanokh into three just to reform it again), all I think Gurdjieff is doing is illustrating the whole process from The Source emitting the energy wave to its collapsing into a ‘being’ of some description, at which point Gornahoor’s experiment kicks in. Gurdjieff may even be hinting at the way the energy is ‘recycled’ through various stages until it finds a ‘host’ capable of turning it into the good stuff that The Source needs to keep the whole cosmic show on the road. You could even – and I am taking a bit of a punt here – take a step back and hazard that Gurdjieff is suggesting that only a sufficiently advanced being – a guru in other words – is capable of examining the three centres of a spiritually mangled human being, working out what the problem is, and putting the whole thing back together again the way it’s meant to be.

And now it gets interesting, because Gornahoor begins to demonstrate what happens when the Okidanokh attempts to re-blend with one of its three forces missing. It’s essential, at this point, to list what happens in exact order (and I’ll chuck in comments where I think they’re relevant):

1. The vacuum pump creates an absolute vacuum in the ‘chamber’ with hermetically sealed glass-like walls we mentioned above.

2. The process of ‘striving-to-reblend-into-a-whole’ is kick started in the separate forces of the Okidanokh within the vacuum (it is not made clear if the vacuum state is the catalyst to kick start the process or simply analogous to a newly formed human being into which the Okidanokh strands are poured).

3. Gornahoor acts as an external Agent of Reason and excludes the Reconciling Force from the  ‘striving-to-reblend-into-a-whole’ process.

4. With only the Positive and Negative Forces ‘striving-to-reblend-into-a-whole’, the harmonious Law of Threes (a basic and founding Law of cosmic build and balance) is breached and the result is the ‘process-of-the-reciprocal-destruction-of-two-opposite-forces’ which manifests as ‘artificial light’ or, to you and me, electricity. Gornahoor asserts that the clash of the two Forces within the vacuum can generate 3,040,000 volts.

5. Gornahoor demonstrates the release of electricity (or ‘rays’ as he calls it) by allowing it out of the sealed chamber and temporarily blinding Beelzebub and the other onlookers by feeding it into the wider lighting system.

6. Gornahoor allows the third Force of the Okidanokh – the Reconciling Force – to join the ‘striving-to-reblend-into-a-whole’ process within the vacuumed chamber with the result that, although the voltage still sits at 3,040,000, electricity is no longer generated by the clash. The Law of Threes has restored the process to harmony. This proves, says Gornahoor, that when The Law of Threes is in full working order, the normal senses cannot discern the blending of the three Forces of the Okidanokh; but when The Law of Threes is not conformed to, then the resultant ‘unlawful’ clash of forces can be witnessed, because something is wrong.

Well, what are we to make of all this? A lot, probably, but for now let’s just settle for the observation that the Reconciling Force operates as some sort of regulatory amperage (at least in Gurdjieff’s analogy above) and observe that, as far as human behaviour is concerned, people who operate on two opposing Forces or centres clashing (angry, distraught, aggressive, insane and so on) are far easier to recognise than the serene dudes cruising along and blissing out with all of their three centres purring along in harmony.

Gornahoor the scientist’s next move was to invite Beelzebub to get into some sort of protective suit and enter with him into the vacuum chamber in order to be able to witness first-hand some peculiarities of the Active Force of the Okidanokh. Again, we have to read this next bit very carefully, and it’s well worth doing so because there are, in my opinion, parts in which Gurdjieff begins to get to the heart of how the human psycho-spiritual apparatus works:

1. The suits are like diving suits or space suits, although Gurdjieff, writing when he did, wouldn’t have known what the latter are – , with reinforced plates and helmets that had a breathing tube attached to the outside of the chamber. It is interesting to note that Beelzebub, here, describes air as the ‘second being-food’, a description that will become more important later in the work. There was also a communication tube connecting the suits of Beelzebub and Gornahoor.

2. Beelzebub remarks that Gornahoor was, at that time, a not fully perfected three-brained being, with the inference that, had he been, he would have been able to manifest in a vacuum with no protective equipment or other aids. Interesting comment, that, I thought; are we talking the ability to manifest in some kind of disembodied astral form here, or are we looking at an analogy for the suggestion that Pure Reason – that is, highly-honed thought process – is a function independent of (and therefore, unaffected by) external conditions?

3. Fascinatingly, the helmets were also fitted with a device that allowed their wearers to visibly perceive everything – both normally visible and normally invisible to the eye – within that chamber (at least that, I think, is the inference if the chamber is taken metaphorically – another allusion to we humans needing assistance if we are to interpret everything around us accurately: in a sense, I suppose, to be able to perceive the reality behind the reality. The allusion to humans requiring the assistance of, for instance, a guru, is strengthened by Beelzebub explaining that the device which helped them see everything was somehow ‘fed’ by magnetic currents from outside which aided the perception of normal three-brained beings).

4. Beelzebub and Gornahoor seal themselves off inside the chamber. In so doing, I believe that Gurdjieff is ‘taking us inside’ the psycho-spiritual workings of the human mind. In other words, he is taking us inside that part of us that is our ‘self’: all alone, and separated from the rest of the world.

5. Gornahoor activates the vacuum pump to rid the chamber of any residue from the previous experiment and, once again, the emphasis is that this action was intentionally performed by a being exercising Reason (so possibly analogous to The Source starting from a clean slate).

6. Beelzebub explains to his grandson, Hassein, that although Beelzebub was, even at that time, a sufficiently advanced three-brained being, and able to move without too much difficulty between planets with different atmospheres, being exposed to a complete vacuum left even his ‘being’ reeling. The effect, he says, was as if each of his three centres – his ‘thinking’, ‘feeling’, and ‘moving’ centres – were, commensurate with the increasing vacuum, slowly dying, and losing their ability to function.

7. Beelzebub’s state of perception narrowed down from deriving conclusions from everything happening around him as well as inside him, to just deriving conclusions only from what was happening within himself: so, a narrowing of perception, then. With this narrowing – or focusing – of perception, Beelzebub had the sensation that those parts of his planetary body that housed the ‘second’ and ‘third’ centres (that’s the Negative Force in the spinal column and the Reconciling Force in the nerve nodes/solar plexus respectively) were gradually dissolving, and – and this is the crucial bit – their functions gradually ‘migrated’ to the ‘first’ centre (that’s the Positive Force located in the head) and were unified into that centre’s function. As the functions of all three centres became unified in the one, thinking centre, Beelzebub felt his state of perception and true understanding expanding and improving to encompass everything both outside and inside of himself. Now this is a very important description, because it analogises the human ‘journey’ to the perfection of Reason (with a capital R) where the only true form of discernment is when emotion and action are passed through the filter of rational thought. Beelzebub is describing the attainment of that state of existence in the realm of intellect that Greek philosophers like Socrates and Plato called ataraxia and Roman philosophers like Seneca called constantia, but that we, for want of a better term, right now will call Objective Reason. Where Gurdjieff got the concept from – his reading of ancient Greek and Roman texts, Eastern religions and philosophies, his ‘Meetings with Remarkable Men’ – I can’t really tell, but it’s a concept that’s as old as human civilisation itself.

8. Gornahoor, who has been tweaking his device by pulling levers and flicking switches, makes a mistake (eh?) and inadvertently makes ‘parts of his body more dense than was necessary’. That, coupled with the fact he was taking in air through the tube attached from outside, gave him a ‘shock’ which lifted him off his feet and left him floundering. Now, the mechanics of this are possibly testament to the incomplete contemporary knowledge (the 1920’s) of what happens to somebody who is, in effect, trussed up in a space suit in a vacuum, but I feel that Gurdjieff is making a contrast between the almost sublime state Beelzebub has managed to achieve through the harmonising of his three centres, and the almost comical bumbling around of Gornahoor when the balance of his ‘internal machine’ is upset.

9. Beelzebub goes silent and then makes a very strange gesture (not described in the text) with his left hand, before continuing to talk, but in a tone that was ‘not proper to his own voice’. Now, I mentioned in an earlier installment how Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson is peppered with Beelzebub making strange gestures with different parts of his body that are never explained in the text but which must, I’d imagine, have some meaning. To me, they are almost like the gestures that the ancient Roman orators used to make when declaiming – and they, too, meant something – but I’m not going to go down the track of attempting an explanation here as this section is long enough as it is and we’ve still a while to go to get through it all. After making the gesture, Beelzebub confesses to Hassein that he has physical safety concerns for his participation in Gornahoor’s experiment.

10. Gornahoor gets his space suit and planetary body  under control with much difficulty and only after a ‘special and complicated’ maneuver. Again, I suspect this is a metaphor for the effort and skill required to get a malfunctioning human back on psycho-spiritual track.

11. Gornahoor explains that the three identical Momonodooars (sockets with electric arc-lamps) situated under the table in the chamber are connected to the three external containers in which the three Forces of the Okidanokh are stored. Through them he can draw as much or as little of the three Forces (Positive, Negative, or Reconciling) as he wishes and thereby control the force with which they recombine. First, says, Gornahoor, he will reproduce the same experiment they witnessed just now from outside the chamber, and allow only the Positive and Negative forces to recombine. This, we remember, is a contravention of The Law of Threes, and this time we are going to witness what happens from inside the chamber; that is from within the pyscho-spiritual self.

12. After double-checking that the whole chamber is hermetically sealed against any energy leak or ray-emission, Gornahoor introduces equal amounts of the Postive and Negative Forces. The voltmeter rises again to precisely 3,040,000 volts, but, to Beelzebub’s consternation, there are no changes to how or what he is able to perceive in the room.

13. The next part is a tad confusing, but let’s have a go at it anyway: When Beelzebub asks why he can’t discern any result from the clash of the Positive and Negative Forces that is generating 3,040,000 volts, Gornahoor responds by first of all turning off the only device using electricity left in the sealed chamber – a small lamp – but, although the chamber goes dark, the voltmeter still reads the same. Gornahoor attempts to explain: the impervious walls of the chamber, he says, are designed to allow through only ‘certain vibrations arising from nearby concentrations’ which are discernible by the sight of normal three-brained beings (I think the emphasis on normal; that is, not advanced three-brained beings – i.e humans – is what is important here). A cosmic Law states, apparently, that rays (I am assuming Gurdjieff is referring specifically to rays that can, at some level, be picked up by the human sense organs) can only somehow interact with human sense organs when ‘the result of manifestation is proportionate to the force of striving received from the shock’. This rather complex concept means, I think, simply that the greatest distance any rays emitted from two forces coming together can travel is proportionate to the amount of energy released by the clash. So, because the clash of the Postive and Negative Forces of the Okidanokh generates a lot of energy, the effects can be perceived at some distance. OK, I’m going to jump the gun a bit here and suggest that what that implies, in terms of a human individual’s behaviour, is that when the Postive and Negative centres clash without the harmonising influence of the Reconciling centre, the potential for spiritual damage can spread out to affect everything around them.

14. Gornahoor then presses a button to allow the hermetically sealed chamber access to the exterior room, which immediately floods everything – inside and out – with the same  blinding light Beelzebub had seen before when standing outside the chamber. This is due, he says, to the energy generated by the clash of the two Okidanokh Forces which had now been released from the sealed chamber, being ‘reflected’ back from outside ‘to the place of its arising’ – and if that’s not an analogy for a human being who doesn’t harmonise their three centres (and instead wastes the opportunity of a life of spiritual progression) ‘dissipating’ out into the wider energy pool to be returned to The Source for recycling, then I don’t know what is. At least, that’s my take on that last bit: essentially, that if you only ever engage two of your three available centres, it’s all a bit of a waste of time.

15. Gornahoor now demonstrates how the process of Okidanokh Force separation and recombination forms the interiors of planets; that is their mineral make-up. This experiment, he says, will explain how the stresses and energy releases of the Force clashes involved in the creation of these ‘mineraloids, gases, metalloids, metals, and so on’ ultimately result in the delicate and fragile ‘totality-of-vibrations’ which keeps any given planet, sun, asteroid, or comet spinning on its axis and travelling through space in a harmonious dance with everything else. I really like this concept. It’s quite humbling to think of everything in the multiverses spinning and whizzing around everything else in a beautifully poised, stately and controlled, yet incredibly powerful waltz. Imagine the massive forces involved, the almost unimaginable energy and power tugging and pulling in a cats-cradle of gravitational give-and-take, and yet all somehow, in some way, under control and just whizzing about as if a toy in the hands of a child. Bloody magnificent! It’s actually really beautiful. It’s no wonder that people like Pythagoras said that the dance of the celestial bodies around one another generated a structured tone (like a scale); a concept we now refer to as The Music of the Spheres.

16. Gornahoor has a piece of ‘red copper’ delivered into the chamber and places it on a mat within another (this time spherical – to represent a planet perhaps?) hermetically sealed container. He explains that copper is an example of a metal created during planetary formation at a particular density to play its part in maintaining the harmonious movement of the planet. Gornahoor will proceed to demonstrate how artificially messing with its constituent Forces of the Okidanokh will transmute the Copper, but, first of all, he explains that minerals (and, we are meant to infer, other planetary deposits) are formed from a single Force of the Okidanokh (in the case of Red Copper it’s the Active Force). The idea is that the minerals (and other things) of which a planet’s interior is composed and their relative percentages of the whole interior mass, absorb a Force of the Okidanokh which then blends with it in an inseparable bond. But – and this is the important bit – because the Okidanokh Forces are always striving to re-blend, the tension and energy this creates within a planet is responsible for how it spins and the speed and mass with which it enters the interplanetary dance. It’s actually a very elegant explanation, although I suspect that Gurdjieff was wide awake to its scientific flaws and only meant the whole explanation to be taken allegorically.

17. Gornahoor goes on to explain further about how anything in which one or more strands of the Okidanokh end up radiates a kind of ‘energy’ that reflects what the strand or strands of the Okidanokh are up to inside them. The radiations come into contact with one another and, under normally functioning conditions, the resultant interaction accounts for the gradually changing density within planets, which is the conscious adjustment each celestial body is continually making to keep the whole, delicate, planetary dance in balance. I guess we can, again, adopt the as-above-so-below approach to all of this and compare the continually self-adjusting planets to humans, with their ever shifting moods and attitudes, continually moving and readjusting to one another, both in mind-set and location, to keep society going in a balanced way. And, going back to Gurdjieff’s depiction of a solar system’s planets continually readjusting their internal densities to compensate for each other in order to keep the whole system balanced, we can extrapolate that outwards and imply the same for galaxies making tiny adjustments here and there to keep the galactic dance from descending into chaos; and even whole universes or whole dimensions. Keeping your inner balance to equipoise the whole is the name of the game here.

18. Getting back to the piece of red copper, Gornahoor advises Beelzebub that its density in terms of the yardstick measurement he calls the sacred element Theomertmalogos is 444; that is, it is 444 times less ‘vivifying’ (by which I think he means closer to the pure, unseparated Okidanokh energy). Gornahoor then sets up a microscope for Beelzebub to witness what happens to the red copper when he introduces the Okidanokh into the sealed sphere in which the metal is contained. The three Forces (Positive, Negative, and Reconciling) are introduced in equal amounts and,because everything remains in balance within and without the metal, nothing changes, the three Forces of the Okidanokh recombine and it disappears back off through a pipe into one of the outside containers.

19. Gornahoor then repeats the experiment but with a greater degree of the Negative Force strand of the Okidanokh, and this time, through the microscope, Beelzebub witnesses the atoms of the red copper mutate into something else, which he analogises to Hassein as like watching a large riot in an enclosed public square in which all the participants slaughter each other with any means at their disposal. And, of course, this analogy is another example of the as-above-so-below concept: unless human society is stable and in harmony it will self-destruct.

20. Gornahoor changes the amount of each separate Okidanokh Force in turn, eventually demonstrating to Beelzebub that the original red copper can be transmuted into any other metal in existence – even gold, which, by the way, has a ‘vivifying’ factor of 1439 (there are supposed to be a lot of occult properties in gold but we haven’t time for that fascinating digression here) – and thereby proves a fundamental universal Truism (with a capital ‘T’): that everything around us is in potentia everything else. We would say that what we are witnessing Gornahoor doing here is effecting molecular change to transform one substance into another, but Gurdjieff, through Beelzebub, is overlaying this with something more fundamental. Molecular change, he is saying, is the process of change, but the actual agent of change is the Okidanokh and any variation from an harmonious and equal balance between its three Forces is a catalyst for change.

On that note, Gurdjieff breaks off from his narration about the encounter between the raven, Gornahoor, and Beelzebub in the ultra-science lab on Saturn, and returns to the direct conversation between Beelzebub and his grandson, Hassein. After briefly mentioning again that he had, at some stage, committed a massive cock up that had caused his exile, Beelzebub promises Hassein that the boy, himself, will have the opportunity to examine the apparatus used in the experiment with Gornahoor because Beelzebub had been allowed to take it back to his home planet Karatas after his recall from banishment. And that, ladies and gentlemen and others, is the end of that chapter. Phew!

Wow! There was a whole lot in there. I suppose the whole thing imparts a message and also a warning. The message comes in the fairly simple shape of an analogy that when human beings get their three centres (the three Forces of the Okidanokh) out of kilter, life becomes more difficult. But Gurdjieff also chucks in the lifeline that you can help to get yourself back on track with the help of a guru.

But on another level, a warning level, this passage is an indictment against humanity for messing about with forces that it shouldn’t. The Law of Threes dictates the only ‘safe’ environment in which the three forces of the Okidanokh (which, remember, through the plan of The Source, constitute All and Everything) can operate and convert energy to the form The Source needs to keep everything from collapsing. Abusing that Law is ‘unnatural’ and it’s implied that each abuse, each ‘unlawful’ combination of the three forces, somehow upsets the cosmic balance and too much abuse will prove harmful if not fatally destructive.

So Gurdjieff is broadcasting a fundamental message here: don’t mess with the natural order! There’s a delicate balance in the cosmos that has to be observed for the whole purpose of the grand machine to play out. Any deviation from the Laws that make the whole thing work has consequences.

From a purely personal self-help perspective, we can take from this passage what it tells us about perception. Lots of things in life are intangible. Emotions, for instance, are not always visible on a face and can often not be identified by somebody’s actions. So, sometimes, everything has to be taken into account, all the ‘clues’ whether visible (an expression, an action) or invisible (information from other sources or what you yourself have experienced either in the now or in the past) must be put together in the inner sanctum of your rational thoughts in order for you to arrive at the true picture. And the same goes for when you witness consequences. It’s necessary to put together all the preceding contributory factors to really get why something has happened. Our normal five senses aren’t up to the job – you have to use the inside of your noddle as well

Right, I’m sorry that one was so long, so thanks for sticking it out – I hope it didn’t bore you. The next installment covers Beelzebub’s second descent to the planet Earth and the narrative becomes a whole lot easier for a while, so I hope to see you there.

Welcome back to this tour through G. I. Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson. The last two passages have been pretty heavy, although they’ve been necessary to both expand upon and illustrate through analogy, Gurdjieff’s take on how the Multiverse works. In short, the whole thing is a perpetual-motion device designed to recycle energy back to The Source (whatever or whoever that might be) so that he/she/it doesn’t run out of puff and disappear. Humanity’s part in this, as a three brained being, is to absorb a critical part of that radiated energy from The Source (called the Okidanokh). Once absorbed, the Okidanokh separates out into its three component Forces – the Positive, Negative, and Reconciling Forces – which each sits in a different physical area – or centre – of the body. The idea is to get the three centres working together in perfect harmony in order to obtain Objective Reason, which is the ability to analyse everything around you using only the intellect. Why only the intellect? Well, because your physical senses aren’t equipped to fully understand what they see, hear, smell, taste, or touch – and they often lie to you. When you exercise Objective Reason, you somehow coat extra ‘bodies’ around yourself, one of which is generally known as the Astral body, and the other, which is even more refined, is generally known as the Soul. As far as we have been able to work out so far, these bodies have the ability to survive physical death. All of this – Objective Reason and the coating on of extra ‘bodies’ – somehow refines the emanations that you give back out to the Multiverse and find their way back to replenish The Source and keep the whole cosmic show on the road. But if you do not make the effort to better yourself and coat yourself with extra ‘bodies’ the implication (as we’ve read it so far) is that, when you die, that’s it for you as that particular being – you’ve reached the end of the road, because the Okidanokh that was in you simply recombines into what it started off as and goes zipping back out into the Multiverse looking for a less lazy host to do the job of energy refinement. That’s a pretty simple explanation of what is probably a much more complex concept, but it’ll do us for now.

In this next section, Beelzebub explains to his grandson, Hassein, why he had to descend to Earth a second time during his long exile in our solar system. I actually think that Gurdjieff uses the word descend deliberately here as he generally has Beelzebub depict Earth as a planet with some very serious problems, whose three-brained inhabitants (that’s us humans) are a fair way down the scale from the pretty advanced Beelzebub himself. Anyway, I really like this section as not only does it give us an amusingly narrated insight into the cataclysmic stupidity of humanity where it concerns our attitude to religion, but it also tells us more about how the process of death fits in with the grand cosmic scheme of things. It also contains what I think is one of the most powerful passages in the whole of the work, but you can read that when you get to it further down the page. So here goes:

Beelzebub begins by given Hassein a brief overview of the topographical changes to the layout of Earth since his first visit to that ill-begotten lump of rock. The continent of Atlantis, he says, had now sunk beneath the waves and the resultant seismic upheaval had caused new land masses to rise, to nearly all of which the surviving humans had spread and multiplied excessively (a point, says Beelzebub, he’ll enlarge upon at some later stage). The members of Beelzebub’s own tribe who were residing in exile on Earth also all managed to escape the catastrophe thanks to the disaster being prophesied a year in advance by their very own female seer, who advised everybody to migrate to a nearby continent that eventually became Africa. I think the prophetess bit is a bit tongue-in-cheek as Beelzebub goes on to hint that this female seer had ‘foreseen’ the catastrophe about to sink Atlantis by having developed her Objective Reason to a very high level. In other words, she spotted the signs, put two and two together, and advised all her fellow tribal comrades to bugger off before it was too late.

Beelzebub then explains why he ended up on Earth for a second time: A group of high officials from The Source arrived on Mars (Beelzebub’s home-in-exile), many of whom had been on the first delegation which had to sort out the first disaster to hit Earth when it was smacked into by a comet, and two fragments, the Moon and Anulios, split off. They explained that they’d been keeping an eye on the planet to make sure their readjustments were working, but unfortunately there’d been an unforeseen effect, because when the planet finally jolted back into its correct centre of gravity after losing the two sizable chunks, it had caused a massive seismic upheaval that had sunk the continent of Atlantis and changed the layout of seas and land masses across the planet. Despite the mayhem, though, the delegation was now satisfied that neither the planet Earth, nor its missing chunks – The Moon and Anulios – any longer had the potential to upset the wider cosmic balance; indeed, the Moon and Anulios were now ‘independent’ celestial bodies within the solar system. The leader of the delegation, the Angel Looisos, then gets down to the nub of his visit and makes his request to Beelzebub.

The Moon, he said, being now an independent object, had started to form an atmosphere in accordance with the overall cosmic plan, but the formation of that atmosphere was being impeded because of a peculiarity being exhibited by humanity back down on Earth. I’ll come to the ‘peculiarity’ in a moment, but Looisos said, that rather than having to resort to a drastic remedial measure, would Beelzebub consider going to Earth and finding some way of stopping the ‘peculiarity’ by appealing to humanity’s Reason. The problem, he said, was this:

Since the catastrophe that sank Atlantis, mankind had spread out again and multiplied. There were three major population centres that were of concern. We later learn that all three countries are in Asia. The first, Tikliamish, adjoined the Eastern coastline of the Caspian Sea, the second, Maralpleicie, was located in what is now the Gobi Desert, and the third, Pearl-Land, was modern day India. In all three places, humankind had developed a form of religion. Although each of the three religions was unlike the other two, all of them had developed the widespread use of sacrificial offerings. It’s worth quoting what the Angel Looisos thinks about this, as I don’t think I can put it any better myself:

“And this custom of theirs is based on the notion, which can be cognised only by their strange Reason alone, that if they destroy the existence of beings of other forms in honor of their gods and idols, then these imaginary gods and idols of theirs would find it very, very agreeable, and always and in everything unfailingly help and assist them in the actualization of all their fantastic and wild fancies.”

I love that speech. Anyway, Looisos went on to explain why this has become a problem for the surrounding areas of the solar system – and you have to remember, here, that, as we’ve discussed in previous passages, energy from The Source that’s converted by one- and two-brained beings goes into keeping the local area of the cosmos going, while energy from the Source that’s converted by three-brained beings is intended to be fed back to The Source to stop he/she/it from dissipating: In other words, one- and two-brained beings keep the structure sound and balanced so that three-brained beings can do their thing. Remember also that the whole cosmic machine is a finely tuned instrument that can be easily upset and imbalance can have dire repercussions. It is important not to lose sight of the fact that everything, ultimately, is dependent on everything else.

So, bearing that in mind, Looisos went on to tell Beelzebub that this – in essence – slaughter of lower-brained animals in sacrificial ceremonies, had caused a massive excess of the energy that is normally released at death and used to help ‘develop’ those two celestial bodies in relatively near space: The Moon and Anulios. The Angel said that, because of that excess, the Moon was not able to maintain the energy-juggling act required to help develop its own atmosphere the way it was supposed to, and the imbalance could have potential disastrous repercussions that would spread out from the local solar system into the wider universe. I suppose, in a way, that’s like anything: give a human too much food; give plants too much water; give wayward kids too much freedom . . . and there are consequences. And with such a delicately balanced machine as the multiverse . . . well, anything might happen.

Hinting to Beelzebub that finding a successful solution without having to resort to ‘drastic cosmic measures’ (not specified, but I certainly don’t like the sound of them) might help mitigate whatever had got Beelzebub exiled to our solar system, the Angel Looisos departed, leaving Beelzebub carrying the baby, as it were. There is probably a whole undercurrent about remorse and atonement and taking responsibility for your actions here, but it becomes a bit lost in the almost lighthearted tone of the narrative.

So Beelzebub accepted the challenge, eager to demonstrate that he was a willing (but, importantly, independent – he had, after all, used his Reason to agree to the task) particle in the immense cosmic machine.

His ship, Occasion, landed in what is the modern Caspian Sea, in the northwest of the relatively newly formed continent of Asia which had, at that time, become the major centre of human population and civilisation. According to Beelzebub, the Amu Darya river, which now empties out into the Aral Sea, then flowed directly into the Caspian, which made it easy for him to sail to the capital of that land of Tikliamish (the modern day Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan general area) which was called Koorkalai. As a little aside, here, Beelzebub hints that, although Earth had already suffered two catastrophes (the comet impact that broke off two big chunks, and the jolting back into the correct centre of gravity that had, amongst other seismic upheavals sunk Atlantis), it would, in the future, suffer a third, one of the effects of which would be to cover this Tikliamish region with sand. It would also cover Maralpleicie (the Gobi Desert) with sand, and throw up the Himalayas as a barrier between Pearl-Land (India) and the rest of the continent. Threes, you see . . . it’s all about threes. Oh, and sevens, but we’ll come to them later in the work.

Anyway, at the time of Beelzebub’s second descent to Earth, Tikliamish was still a lush and fertile land. Gurdjieff keeps the tone light and amusing here, and explains that in all three centres – Tikliamish, Maralpleicie, and Pearl-Land – the people, rather than striving for the proper and expected goal of three-brained beings everywhere of perfecting their being to bring their three Okidanokh centres into harmony, had instead developed an obsession for ‘proving’ that their own country and civilisation  was the pre-eminent ‘Centre-of-Culture’ for the entire planet. This competition inevitably escalated into conflict between the countries. This, of course, is an illustration, in macrocosm, of the disharmony between the three centres of an individual human being, with each vying for supremacy rather than working in concert with the others.

Arriving in Tikliamish’s capital, Koorkalai, Beelzebub wasted no time and started hanging out in the restaurants, clubs, dance halls, meeting places, and such like; the idea being that these were the places to watch and meet people and get a handle on what they were thinking and doing. Incidentally, as a little aside, Gurdjieff maintained that one of the best professions for self-development is to be a member of the waiting staff in a restaurant. He reckoned that, if you were any good at your job, the constant need to be aware of everything going on around you, and – importantly – to be able to ‘read’ people and developments as they played out; indeed, to learn to accurately predict where you would next be needed and with what, was excellent training for self-awareness and thinking about how your own little piece of the Universe was unfolding around you. But I digress.

After a while, Beelzebub met the acquaintance of one Abdil, a priest of the local religion who understood the mindset of his congregation. Beelzebub singled out Abdil because the local man retained some vestige of conscience which inferred he had the potential to develop compassion and sensitivity to all fellow earthly creatures. Before getting to how he put Abdil to use, Beelzebub, in a  passage that tells you all you really need to know about the stupidity of many religious practices, explains a little more about the custom of sacrificial offerings, the numbers of which had, he says, at the time of his second descent, reached astonishing levels. Weak one- and two-brained beings were being slaughtered in the name of imaginary gods and fantastical saints in incalculable numbers. The illogicality and stupidity employed were staggering. If a man wanted something, he would promise his god a number of ‘offerings’. If the man got what he wanted, he slaughtered with utmost veneration; but if he didn’t get what he wanted, he would then increase the number of slaughtered animals in an attempt to win back the favour of the imaginary deity. Men even, says Beelzebub, divided the sacrificial victims into ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ categories, believing, in their delusion, that their gods would find only the ‘clean’ animals agreeable. The sacrifices were made at home, in public, or at special religious sites dedicated to gods that humans themselves had invented, or saints they had themselves elevated to sainthood. He goes on in the same vein, pointing out that it always seems to be the strong who sacrifice the weak, even in the rare instances of human sacrifice when a father would offer up his son, a husband his wife, an elder son his younger sibling, and, more often than these, slaves; that is, captives from the periodic wars when humanity went on mutually destructive bents. Beelzebub explains to Hassein that ritual sacrifice was still a peculiarity of the planet Earth but, thankfully, nowhere near the scale it was during that second descent.

The next passage, in which Beelzebub lectures the priest Abdil on the dumb, illogical, unreasoning absurdity of practising animal sacrifice is amongst my favourite sections in the whole of Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, and I just wish I could copy it out here for you verbatim. It is very powerful: by turns scathing, humorous, and deeply, deeply touching, and it leaves you feeling not a little scoured . . . and also profoundly ashamed of what unthinking humanity, with its ridiculous and oh so fallible reasoning, is capable of. The passage is, unfortunately, too long to reproduce in its entirety, so I’ll have to cherry-pick a bit and select the most important bits. All of what follows in the next paragraph is Gurdjieff’s voice through Beelzebub. I have added no comments of my own:

Beelzebub begins by pointing out that Abdil has faith and tells him that faith is a good and desirable thing. It is desirable, he says, because it intensifies an individual’s self-awareness that they are a particle in the great cosmic Everything. But killing a fellow being, and killing it in the very name of its CREATOR has no part in faith. Is that being’s life not just as important as yours to that CREATOR who created you both? To sacrifice a fellow being is to misuse your Reason. You sacrifice something because you can out-think it, because it is mentally weaker than you. What you are doing, in objective terms, is evil. In terms of the universal machine, you are killing off one of the essential cogs that keep the balance so that the conditions are kept stable for you, a three-brained being, to self-evolve and perfect your own purpose. On top of that you diminish yourself because, by killing, you are destroying the hopes of The Source that you will evolve and play a bigger part in running All and Everything. Why on Earth do you think, that by killing something, you are pleasing the CREATOR? Does it not, for one single second, enter your head that the being whose existence you destroyed was put here for a specific purpose? Think, humanity! Stop and think! Think, not in your normal day-dreamy illusory way, but properly . . . as befits a being who claims to have been made ‘in the likeness of God’. Did the CREATOR write on the foreheads of the creatures you massacre that he wanted them destroyed in his honour and glory? No, of course not! That could never, ever be! What you are doing, your animal sacrifice, is an invention of humanity’s only. To the CREATOR there is no difference between the life of man and any other being. The CREATOR foresaw, when the cosmic machine was devised, that necessarily different environments would demand necessarily different life-forms. A human cannot jump in the sea and live as a fish any more than a fish could sit in a cafe and drink green tea. Everything, absolutely everything, is designed as it is because that is the part it plays in the inconceivably huge machine of the multiverse. It sounds strange, but it is logical. Abdil’s two-brained donkey, for instance, performs a function on the Earth, a function it would be a lot harder to perform if it had more advanced cognitive faculties; in other words, its lower mental powers are fitting to its function. Three-brained humans are a problem in this respect. They are designed with the potential to achieve high Objective Reason yet waste the tools they are given to achieve that on low cunning. And yet donkey and human both are part of the overall plan for All and Everything.  Everything, absolutely everything, every single one- two- and three-brained being is equally necessary for the harmony of the entire cosmic machine. For that reason alone, the CREATOR holds every single being equally dear. But now, humanity, a three-brained race, whose striving should be to Objective Reason, has taken it upon itself to use its intellectual superiority to lord it over unfortunate, less smart creatures and to have the bald-faced impertinence to extinguish their existence in the name of their God, actually believing they are doing something good. And the terribly sad thing is that, if humans could actually understand this evil crime they are committing against the very universe itself, they would, in their remorseless shame at the extent of the atrocity they’d perpetrated, hang their heads and never ever ever again take the life of another being, of whatever form, as a sacrificial offering. The CREATOR’s commandment is: ‘Love everything that breathes‘. The absurdity of mankind’s reasoning knows no bounds. Having opted to wantonly destroy slower-witted life-forms than himself, he has had the audacity to divide them into clean and unclean. In this respect man is a coward as well as a moron. A sheep is clean but a lion, for instance, is not. The reason for this is that a sheep is dull-witted and weak whereas a lion is clever and strong. Man is a coward! He would not dare to capture and sacrifice a lion.

There is a fair bit more that I haven’t included in the above paragraph, but what I have included should be enough to give you a feeling for how the conversation went. In short, Beelzebub gave Abdil a right old bollicking – very much like an adult giving a wayward child the what for.

The result of the lecture was that Abdil, whom, remember, Beelzebub had selected for the dressing down because he had the potential to listen and, more importantly, to actually understand what had been said, took himself away and thought for two days solid. He then, at a huge religious festival in his own temple, delivered an hours long sermon that lasted into the next day. The lecture taught against the making of sacrificial offerings, and it was of such appealing eloquence, and delivered with such honesty and passion that many in the congregation, having been brought to tears, were persuaded by his words. Fragments of the speech spread, some people began to change their habits, and Abdil, now a bit of a celebrity, went on a lecture tour around other temples throughout the whole country of Tikliamish. But, as usually happens in circumstances such as these, other people in power – in this case other priests – fearing a decline in their authority and prestige, plotted and conspired against Abdil, spreading slander and making attempts on his life. Despite their efforts, Abdil’s doctrine of love to all fellow creatures daily grew in popularity until, finally, the other priests put Abdil on trial. He was excommunicated, but that wasn’t the end of the matter. As Abdil was now an outcast, people who had followed him began to turn against him and he was eventually murdered. Abdil’s elderly (and last) retainer brought the news of the discovery of the hacked body To Beelzebub who, fearing further desecration of the body, gathered up the parts and took them back to Mars.

But Abdil left behind a legacy. Although animal sacrifice was still prevalent, enough of Abdil’s preachings were still circulating that the practice was becoming increasingly less common. And for Beelzebub himself, that was mission accomplished. And so it was that the energy imbalance in nearby space-time was made less of a critical issue and the first and only human burial on Mars took place. Just before this chapter on Beelzebub’s second descent to Earth ends, Beelzebub remarks that, awaiting him upon his return to Mars were several new arrivals from his home planet of Karatas, including, he says, Hassein’s grandmother who, at that time, had been selected to become Beelzebub’s partner for the continuation of his line. He refers to this being as his ‘passive’ half (an interesting concept that, the old male=active female=passive force, but it is explained in more detail later on in the work so I won’t comment on it any further at this stage).

There’s not a hell of a lot to add to this one. It’s kind of a hammering home of the Laws that govern the fine balance of the multiverse and how breaching those Laws can affect things. The three countries (remember everything comes in threes), each assuming it is the most important and doing its own thing, represent, of course, the three centres (or Forces) of the Okidanokh within a three-brained being. The conflict, or wars, between them, as each of the three strives for supremacy above the other two, is illustrative of the way a human-being is a battleground between the physical, the emotional, and the intellect. The total discordance which ensues, the utter nonsense that bastardised reasoning comes up with when the three centres are not working in concert, is epitomised by the sheer absurdity of something like animal sacrifice. So deluded does this failure to use Objective Reason make humanity, that it doesn’t even think it is doing anything wrong! On the contrary, in its insanity, it actually believes that animal sacrifice is a good and right thing to do. It is sheer lunacy. There is not one shred of logic in it. And that, my friends, is what happens when we don’t stop and use the faculties given to us by Nature/The Source/God call it what you will.

OK, the next installment covers Beelzebub’s third descent to the planet Earth and everything starts to get a whole lot weirder. Please join me there.

Welcome back to this tour through G. I. Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson.

In the last episode, a very powerful one, we learned how Beelzebub, a higher three-brained being, was sent to Earth for the second time by some sort of Cosmic-Balance Overseer Committee to try to stop mankind mindlessly massacring untold millions of harmless and innocent animals in the name of sacrifice to their made-up gods. The wholesale slaughter, they said, was not only contrary to the intent of the Universal Creator, but was adversely affecting the finely tuned cosmic balance of the physical space around the planet Earth. Beelzebub, if we recall, managed to reverse the trend in the region of Tikliamesh – roughly equivalent to modern day Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan – by indoctrinating a local, one Abdil, who, before being murdered for his beliefs, managed to convince many of his countrymen that the practice of animal sacrifice was a sin against the very universe itself.

This next section of the work describes how Beelzebub, after taking Abdil’s body back to Mars for burial, returned to Earth for the third time. He was still pursuing his mission to put a lid on animal sacrifice, and this time he descended to the area called Maralpleicie and its main city, Gob. Maralpleicie was then a large centre of population but is now covered by the Gobi desert. The area was known for its fabrics and ‘precious ornaments’.

But before Beelzebub gets into the main meat of this narration about this third descent to Earth, he tells his grandson, Hassein, a strange little story about how the continent of Asia came to be populated in the first place. I’m going to mention it, here, because it will be immediately apparent that the stupidity exercised by the people in the story, is alive and well and rampant in our 21st Century world (as it was in the early 20th Century, for whose people Gurdjieff originally intended the parable):

Even before Atlantis sank beneath the waves, begins Beelzebub, a normal three-brained earthling from that ill-fated continent put it about that the powdered horn of an animal called a ‘Pirmiral’ – some kind of deer that still exists apparently – could be ingested to cure all illnesses. Now where have we heard all that old bunkum before? The creatures were, of course, subsequently hunted to extinction on Atlantis, so the hunters had to look elsewhere for their prey and left for other lands, taking their families with them. Several of these groups ended up on the continent of Ashhark, later called Asia. They eventually arrived at the area around what would become Gob, and found it so fertile and productive that they stayed and multiplied.

As a quick aside at this point, we find fruit described as these humans’ principal ‘first being-food’ which is meant, or so I suppose, that it was the principal food for the ‘first’ or physical body. That – almost throwaway – line predicts a topic that comes up in far greater detail later in the work; that is, the different types of ‘food’ required to nourish the three ‘types’ of body, to which we have, for our purposes at this stage of the work, given the names ‘physical’, ‘astral’, and ‘soul/spirit’. The ‘food’ necessary for the upkeep and development of each type of body is, of course, very different – but more of that later in the book. For now, it’s important to note that the three types of ‘body’ are not the same as the three ‘brains’ or ‘centres’ – let’s call them the mechanical, the emotional, and the intellectual – that are created in every three-brained being at birth, and which must be brought into harmony for that human to begin ‘coating’ themselves with the ‘higher’ body types; the astral and the soul/spirit.

Anyway, back to Beelzebub’s story. By a massive coincidence, he tells Hassein, a member of a very learnéd Atlantean sect called the Astrosovers had already migrated to that same area of what would become Gob. He’d gone there because the Astrosovers on Atlantis had – by closely observing nature – worked out that ‘something very serious had to happen in nature’, but, unable to discern exactly what, had sent their members out far and wide to see if they could find out anything more. Their brief was to examine not only what was happening in Nature on the Earth, but also note whatever was happening in the heavens. While this particular Astrosover was seeking answers, the predicted catastrophe struck and Atlantis sank beneath the waves, with the result he could never return home and so was stranded in Maralpleicie.

Now if that’s not a lesson for our rubbish-obsessed, climate mangled, Covid-19 ridden planet, then I don’t know what is. We’ve stopped reading the Earth; we’ve stopped reading Nature; we’ve stopped reading the stars. Everything – absolutely everything – is interconnected, and you can only mess with the fabric of being for so long before something breaks. Gurdjieff knew that back in the early part of the last century and, through his words in Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, he issued a warning. The Earth, Nature, the heavens, all of them are there to be read and understood – we need to interpret the signs. Species are becoming extinct, the ice-caps are melting, wild-fires rage, and the sea is full of plastic. The message – the warning – is clear and we have to heed it before we wreck the whole damned thing. And if you think that Nature doesn’t notice what we do, then take a look at what happened in places like the UK in the years immediately following World Wars I and II. The normal ratio of humans being born between men and women temporarily changed to re balance the huge amount of male lives lost during the conflicts. There is no doubt that Nature is aware of us and what we do at a species level. Mess Her/Him/It about at your peril!

Right, rant over, and back to the text: Time went by, says, Beelzebub, and the inhabitants of the place that was to become Gob in Maralpleicie, waxed and waned in their spiritual development; sometimes moving forwards, and sometimes back, but they grew in number and eventually instituted an hereditary kingship with a line descended from that first, marooned Astrosover.

Long before Beelzebub rocked up on his third visit to Earth, one Konuzion had been King of Gob. Now, Beelzebub had done his homework, and discovered that this Konuzion had had to deal with a nationwide addiction to what is obviously the opium poppy (although Beelzebub says the plant was then called Gulgulian). Konuzion’s subjects were getting absolutely blitzed from chewing poppy seeds from the ripened plant and, in their away-with-the-fairies state, were hallucinating like crazy, with the result that crime, violence, and all manner of lawlessness was rampant.

After discovering the source of the problem, and realising that the drug totally messed with any kind of internal emotional or intellectual balance, Konuzion sent out trusted subjects to impose fines and punishment in an attempt to stamp out the practice. When this didn’t work (when does it ever when it comes to recreational drugs?) the king increased the level of punishment for chewing the seeds and instigated a kind of Big Brother surveillance system to help keep an eye on who was transgressing. It got to the point where the king, himself, would personally examine the miscreants; but that only piqued the curiosity of everyone else, who, wanting to know what all the fuss was about, started taking the drug themselves (oh my, we humans are just so predictable, aren’t we?). And so the number of drug-chewers continued to rise, both in Gob itself and, increasingly, in its provinces. Gurdjieff, in relating this story through the mouth of Beelzebub, is, of course, criticising his own times, and even has Beelzebub tell Hassein exactly that. But the same behaviour – ‘Oh, that’s been made illegal, I wonder why, let’s try it’ – is just as prevalent today as it was in Gurdjieff’s (or even the ‘fictitious’ Konuzion’s) time.

So Konuzion, realising at last that his authoritarian measures to stamp out the drug-fueled lawlessness were absolutely pointless, did what Abdil, Beelzebub’s now murdered friend from his previous descent to Earth, had done. He went into retreat, neither ate nor drank, and meditated for 18 days on what to do next. Abdil, of course, had only locked himself away for a couple of days to work out what he needed to do, and then only after Beelzebub had read him the riot act about the absurdity and impiety of animal sacrifice; so Konuzion is a kind of step up. He’d come to the necessity for reflection and introspection all by himself. His ‘solution’ to the problem, when it came, while ingenious, would be by no means perfect – in fact, it would cause all sorts of knock-on headaches for Beelzebub – but, I think what Gurdjieff is implying here is that at least Konuzion, like Abdil before him, was seeking to apply Reason (with a capital R) by locking himself away from his other senses (by fasting and meditation) to get himself out of a tight spot. In a bizarre kind of parallel, Konuzion was attempting to ‘break out’ of his habitual, institutionalised thinking (the draconian application of law and punishment) in the same way he needed to make his subjects ‘break out’ of their drug habits. With first Abdil (with his problems of an animal sacrifice fixated population) and now Konuzion (with his problems of a drug-messed population with altered psyches), we seem to be moving up into ever more complex metaphors for how badly the human machine can get broken when its centres or ‘brains’ are not working in synch.

So here’s what Konuzion came up with to solve the rampant opium addiction: he invented a religion. According to Beelzebub, at that time in history, Konuzion’s subjects were totally unaware of the existence of any heavenly body but the Earth, and thought that the stars were nothing more than a pattern on a black veil. So Konuzion made it known that, on a large island far away, lived a certain ‘Mr. God’ who had attached physical bodies to souls (Konuzion’s subjects) so that they were both able to survive in their own particular physical environment and be able to serve ‘Mr. God’ and the other souls who had been taken to his island. When Konuzion’s subjects ‘died’, he said, they were released from their physical shackles and their souls were transported to ‘Mr. God’s’ island where, depending on how dutifully each soul had behaved when encased in flesh, they would be assigned an appropriate further existence. If the soul had been ‘good’ it was allowed to remain on ‘Mr. God’s’ island; but if it had been ‘bad’; that is, had existed only to satisfy the desires of its flesh, it was shunted off to a neighbouring, smaller island. And just in case his subjects were wondering how such a faraway being could keep tabs on their behaviour, Konuzion invented a grade of invisible ‘spirits’ who wandered around with caps of invisibility (very Harry Potter) and either dobbed in errant subjects immediately or stored it up to snitch on them on a so-called ‘Day of Judgement’. Also, just in case any quick-thinking subjects were thinking of legging it out of Gob so they wouldn’t be reported on, Konuzion told everyone that the entire world, not just Gob and Maralpleicie, was a preparation room for ‘Mr. God’s’ island.

The island itself was called Paradise and was filled with rivers of milk and honey and, for some reason, lots and lots of available lovely young women. There were clothes, jewels and delicious foods, as well as what, equally bizarrely, sounds like heaps of readily available opium and hashish. If you’re thinking there’s a bit of a paradox there, you’re not alone. How does it work that ‘bad’ people get kicked off Paradise if they’ve spent their physical lives satisfying their bodily lusts, but ‘good’ people, who have abstained from all the goodies when alive, are allowed to fully indulge themselves when dead? It’s a bit like telling a tea-totaller that, when they die, they can drink themselves silly. Now, if that all sounds rather silly, well, it’s meant to. Gurdjieff, in telling us about Konuzion’s invented religion, is satirising the ridiculous logic of most world religions – both past and present – and demonstrating them to be rather poorly thought out attempts by authority to regulate public behaviour and keep order. Unfortunately, most humans don’t stop to think just how poorly thought out most religious doctrine is.

And as for the poor buggers who dared to gratify themselves while alive, well they were dispatched to the smaller island called ‘Hell’ with all the attendant horrors and torments that place name conjures up.

Just as an aside, here, it was one of my favourite authors – either Terry Pratchett or Robert Rankin – who, on the subject of ‘Hell’, said they could never get their head around it for the simple reason that the numbers just didn’t seem to add up. It’s just not fair, they said, that any kind of sensible god would condemn somebody to an eternity of torment when they’d only been given 70 odd years to live a good life and had to get it right first time.

So, Beelzebub finishes relating to Hassein the story of King Konuzion and his attempt to stem the opium frenzy in Gob by inventing a religion which he’d hoped would act as a kind of crowd control, and now gets around to describing what happened when Beelzebub himself arrived in the city some considerable time after those events. 

By the time of Beelzebub’s arrival, a derivative of Konuzion’s religion was in full swing and holding the population in thrall. There are quite a few almost ‘throw-away’ lines in this particular passage of Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson and one of them comes at the point where Beelzebub describes the phenomenon of physical death (the long ago one of Konuzion in this example) as the sacred ‘Rascooarno’. There is a hint, right there, that death, just like birth, is a critical component in the cosmic energy-exchange process, as it serves, again like birth, as an energy separator or refiner, only this time in reverse – but more of that later in the work.

Everyone in Maralpleicie, says Beelzebub upon his arrival there, believed totally in Konuzion’s made-up religion. Although animal sacrifice (for the eradication or, at least, mitigation of which, Beelzebub had been sent to Earth) was nowhere near as bad here as it had been in Tikliamesh, he still needed to find out what was going on, and so, just like in his previous visit, Beezebub’s first action was to haunt the bazaars and chai-shops and attempt to find another Abdil who could tell him what he needed to know and maybe help him achieve his goal. 

Beelzebub soon teamed up with a chai-shop owner – although not on such close terms as he had with Abdil – and, after two months, formulated a plan which he put into action. And Beelzebub’s solution to the problem of animal sacrifice in Maralpleicie, was an absolute gem. The chai-shop was one of the largest in Gob, so Beelzebub put it about, through the gossip of the proprietor, that the ‘spirits in invisible caps’ who wandered the Earth taking notes on humans’ behaviour and dobbing them in to ‘Mr. God’ were none other than the very animals that were being destroyed for food and sacrifice. Brilliant! Ingenious! Rather than kill them, said Beelzebub, humans should be treating the animals with kindness and pleading with them not to snitch on their little misdemeanors to ‘Mr. God’.

Inspired by the chai-shop owner’s repentance of his own misdeeds to these animals/spirits, the message spread initially through the other chai-shops of the city and then seeped into the so-called ‘holy’ places. Gurdjieff, by the way, is quite unequivocal when he says that the information that forms the basis for the creation of a ‘holy’ place on Earth is spread by liars. He doesn’t have much time for orthodox religion, does old Gurdjieff – which should be readily apparent to anyone reading these sections of his work which, through parable, highlight the utter absurdity of the premises on which so many religions are based. In fact, Gurdjieff has Beelzebub state at this juncture that the inhabitants of Earth are totally prone to lying – both consciously and unconsciously – about just about anything. We lie consciously, he says, to obtain some material advantage; and unconsciously when we succumb to ‘hysteria’. There! We’ve been told!

The be-kind-to-animals/spirits movement spread and was soon so successful that people went too far and started to revere animals, and even to worship them. Cart drivers were hauled from their vehicles and oxen set free, the best food was thrown to dogs and strays, and choice morsels were cast into the local sea for the fish. Random animal sounds – barks, brays, whatever – were the signal for people to fall to their knees and start calling upon their gods – and they became mortally offended if anybody laughed at them for doing so. So, here, too, Gurdjieff, through Beelzebub, is spotlighting the utter ludicrousness of human thought where it comes to religion. It is as if some massive, impermeable curtain comes down between reason and belief, and mankind lurches from one absurd belief system to the equally as ridiculous next.

Despite the scathing narrative, though, Gurdjieff does take care to let his readers know that, although he, through Beelzebub, considers the tenets of orthodox religion a ridiculous fiction, he considers it morally reprehensible to ever denigrate another’s beliefs, no matter how unfounded in Reason they may sound. If you think somebody’s beliefs are founded in old tosh, he is saying, seek to persuade otherwise gently: through Reason, and not ridicule, insult, or violence. And I’d just like to add that that applies right across the board; to everything, not just to religion. It all comes down to respect. Respect other people whatever you think of their personal beliefs. There is always some reason why people believe in something or behave in a certain way. Learn to understand your fellow humans – I promise you it’ll make life a lot easier.

The tone of the passage shifts slightly at this point as Gurdjieff broadens out the discussion from religion to include the behaviour of humans in wider society. In a way he is having a crack at the phenomenon of celebrity (a very topical subject now in the first quarter of the 21st Century). His contention is that the more absurdly we comport ourselves, the more outlandishly we promote ourselves, the more ‘stupid, mean, and insolent’ the ‘tricks’ we play, then the more we become noticed and the more our personal fame will spread. Now, in my book, that’s not a one-size-fits-all criticism – there are, after all, some very modest, brilliant people who care deeply for humanity and prefer to stay out of the limelight – but this modern world of ours is certainly becoming one where the superficiality of transient celebrity carries a lot of weight.

Anyway, Beelzebub’s trip to Maralpleicie was a total success, even to the extent that any persons caught attempting animal sacrifice were, themselves, dealt with severely. The passage concludes with Beelzebub, mission accomplished, setting off on a little road trip that would eventually lead him on his first visit to Pearl Land – modern day India. 

I guess that, apart from a couple of threads that are beginning to crop up over and over again – such as the need to practise Reason (with a capital R) and some esoteric hints that the whole multiversal shebang is, as the Quantum physicists are beginning to work out, one massive machine for the transformation and exchange of energy in and out of various states (an exchange in which life, all life, plays an integral part) – the message in this passage is fairly obvious: we behave, for the most part, like sheep. Gurdjieff has singled out religion as the best example to show that humans are willing to believe any old tosh if the package promises them something at the end over which they, themselves, have little or no control – e.g. eternal life and bliss. But there are countless others: political doctrines, miraculous cures, ponzi schemes, and con-artistry of every description, to name but a few. But what Beelzebub shows, is that by the application of a little Reason, dogmatic thinking can be derailed and redirected. What he accomplished in Gob, with his ruse of suggesting that the invisible spirits were, in actuality, the sacrificial animals, was manage to derail a preset way of thinking, and that, I think, is the main lesson we need to take out of this passage: Sometimes it takes a piece of new energy, in the form of another way of looking at things, or even the suggestion of another person, to jolt us out of potentially destructive thought patterns. Don’t just blindly do . . . stop and think!  

I feel I’ve ranted on enough for now, so I’ll leave it here and hope to see you in the next episode when Beelzebub travels, for the first time, to India.

  

 

Welcome back to this tour through G. I. Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson.

The last two episodes have described how Beelzebub, a higher three-brained being, had been sent to planet Earth by some sort of Cosmic Oversight Committee to try to dissuade its spiritually-challenged inhabitants (who are also three-brained but way behind in the psychic-spiritual evolution stakes) from ritual animal sacrifice, because the practice was so prevalent that the psychic energy released by so much wholesale slaughter of innocent creatures was beginning to warp the space around the unfortunate planet and spread into the solar system proper. Beelzebub had targeted three centres of human civilisation on Earth’s most densely populated continent, Asia: Tikliamish (roughly modern Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan), Maralpleicie (the modern Gobi Desert), and Pearl Land (Modern India). By making use of selected local inhabitants and employing first a massive guilt trip (Tikliamish) and then a piece of cunning psychological subterfuge (Maralpleicie), Beelzebub had reduced the levels of animal sacrifice in those two regions to acceptable levels. Which just left Pearl Land – or modern day India – and Beelzebub’s first visit to that land is the subject of this chapter.

This is a relatively long chapter in the book itself, but that’s because it serves as both a culmination of Beelzebub’s mission to eradicate, or at least mitigate, animal sacrifice on Earth, and a kind of summing up of Beelzebub’s/Gurdjieff’s cosmology as it’s been explained so far. If we think of the ‘technical’ descriptions in the previous chapters The Arch-Absurd and The Arch-Preposterous as the ‘theory’ component of what Gurdjieff is attempting to teach us (up to this point anyway), then the visits to the three Asiatic centres described in the last two plus this chapter, comprise the ‘practical’ component; so I’ll work my way through Beelzebub’s first visit to Pearl Land/India and chuck in comments where I think it appropriate. Here we go, then . . .

Rather than scoot back to his home-in-exile on Mars as he had after his first success in Tikliamish, Beelzebub – still, as the chapter opens, in Maralpleicie – decided to team up with a caravan of traders who were intending to travel overland to Pearl Land; and he immediately takes a pop at human vanity; specifically the use of jewellery by all mankind to offset what he calls ‘the value of their inner insignificance’. The real issue is a lot deeper, of course, in that anything – jewellery included – that helps project a ‘false’ image or create a mask over our true selves is a form of deep-seated self-delusion that makes it easier to shirk from doing the hard yards on ourselves that are necessary for spiritual evolution. But Beelzebub doesn’t dwell too much on that at this point in the chapter as it’s actually a prelude for what comes a bit later, and he swiftly moves on.

At this point in the narrative, Beelzebub’s phraseology takes on a rather convoluted turn as he describes how he is assimilating outside impressions and filtering them through his Reason – a sure signal to us, the audience, that we need to sit up and pay attention, because we are going to be asked to make some links between what Gurdjieff has been talking about in previous chapters and what he is about to discuss in this chapter. And so it begins . . .

The first month of the caravan’s journey took it through ‘a region of various terra-firma projections of unusual forms’ containing ‘all kinds of intra-planetary minerals’.  I guess that what Beelzebub is describing here are mountains – most probably the Himalayas – essentially parts of the planet’s innards thrust up from the surrounding crust by the two previous ‘shocks’ that Earth had undergone; namely, the breaking off of the two chunks – The Moon and Anulios – and the subsequent jolting back onto a regular axis which sunk Atlantis. This is a reminder to us that the planet itself is part of a finely-tuned cosmic machine, and when disturbances affect the Earth, the effects are visible – often on a massive scale. Just as our skin can erupt into protuberant boils that consist of matter found within the body, so the Earth’s crust can erupt into mountain ranges that consist of matter found within the planet. As above, so below; everything is a mirror of everything else . . . it’s just a matter of scale and perspective.

The caravan moved on from the high places inhospitable to what we call life and eventually came to areas where the soil was capable of supporting one- and two-brained beings; that is, flora and fauna – plants and animals. Beelzebub’s journey, then, is already taking on a pattern: he is moving through the ‘platforms’ – planets, suns, and the like – whose internal mineral balance is constantly shifting to keep the massive cosmic machine in a perfectly poised dance, and beginning to drill down to the one-, two-, and three-brained beings those ‘platforms’ support, and who are responsible for ultimately transmuting energy to prevent the universal Source from succumbing to entropy.

Bee analogies are marvellous for this type of thing (as they are for many other things – wonderful creature, your bee): The ‘Source’ is the Apiarist, the planets and suns are the physical hives, the three types of bee – worker, drone, queen – are your one-, two- and three-brained beings, and the honey is the ‘energy’ that is the result of the bees’ work transmuting ‘food’ from outside into something that goes back to sustaining the Apiarist/Source. It is a particularly apposite analogy as it carries the implication that the Source must ‘care for’ and continually nourish its system in order to receive the end result (the honey) which, in turn, nourishes it and keeps the whole cycle going. And, just like an apiary, the cosmic machine is very delicate and extremely susceptible to disturbance – every little ripple has a knock-on effect or reaction . . . and that, my friends, is felt at every level, because everything, everything has to readjust to re-establish the balance to keep the machine going. Maybe the concept I have just described there is the one that is sometimes called karma (simply, and mathematically put, a universal Law which demands that everything must balance out to zero) but I’m getting a bit side-tracked here, so let’s get back to Beelzebub’s journey to Pearl Land.

The caravan eventually descended down into Pearl Land and arrived at its chief city which Beelzebub names as Kaimon. Before continuing with what he did there, though, Beelzebub, as he had with the previous two places he visited, begins to tell his grandson, Hassein, a tale about how Pearl Land first became inhabited. But just before he does, there is another mention of a curious gesture – this time made by Hassein – accompanied by a fervent hope that his grandfather evolve to the degree of the sacred Anklad (of which, more later in the work). After acknowledging Hassein’s hopes for his grandfather’s ‘spiritual promotion’ – for want of a better phrase – with only a smile, Beelzebub continues:

Before Atlantis was plunged beneath the waves, he says, one of the more unsavoury consequences of the organ kundabuffer (see previous section The Moon and Mankind’s Problem – see, I warned you that this was a kind of ‘revision’ chapter), which was temporarily implanted in humanity to help redress the first big ‘shock’ to the Earth, was a predilection for bodily adornment in the form of trinkets, amongst which were pearls. Pearls, explains Beelzebub, are created in certain single-brained beings that dwell in the sea which, along with all other water on Earth, is described as the ‘blood of the planet’ and is an essential ingredient in ‘actualising’ the ‘Most Great common-cosmic Trogoautoegocrat’ (hardly surprising as water is essential to maintaining all life on Earth which, in turn, is essential for energy conversion to keep the great cosmic show on the road).

Just as the Atlanteans had hunted the Pirmiral – some kind of deer whose powdered horns were supposed to be a kind of panacea – to extinction on their own continent and had to send hunting groups to Asia to find more, so they did with the poor old oysters who surrounded their island. The pearl-foraging parties were forced to search further and further from Atlantis until one lot, blown off course by a storm, ended up in India where they found pearls galore.

I’ll just jump aside, at this point, to comment that humanity’s wanton and needless destruction of one- and two-brained creatures for no other purpose than to indulge fantastical notions (vanity, ritual animal sacrifice , and so on) that are born in their own psyches with absolutely zero application of Reason, is a very strong theme in this early part of Gurdjieff’s work. Beelzebub maintains that the repercussions of those human fantasies can have wider cosmic consequences in that, if they are not called to heel, they can upset the very balance of All and Everything; but we have to bear in mind that he is also talking on a personal and individual level. When we, as individual humans, let irrationality control our actions, then the waves of consequence ripple out all around us and can affect everyone and everything with which we come into contact.

Anyway, back to the narrative. The castaway pearl hunters from Atlantis, having checked out the new country’s interior, realised that it was a pretty neat place and decided not to bother returning home. A couple of them did go back from time to time to offload and trade their cargos of pearls but they always returned, each time with more and more settlers, so that when the planet’s second ‘shock’ sank Atlantis beneath the waves, this new ‘Land of Beneficence’, as they called it, attracted many survivors from the wrecked  continent. The people multiplied hugely and chose the country’s two main river valleys as their main centres of settlement.

Beelzebub, as he had at Tikliamish and Maralpleicie, decided that his best bet to attack ritual animal sacrifice was through Pearl Land’s religion but, when he arrived, he encountered a complication; because, unlike the other two countries he’d visited, Pearl Land’s inhabitants adhered to several, totally distinct religious teachings, none having anything to do with any of the others. So Beelzebub set out to study them all. He ascertained that the one with the most devotees was one founded on the teachings of a ‘genuine emissary’ sent by the Source; an emissary who went by the name of Saint Buddha.

Wow! That’s a bit of a bombshell, isn’t it? What’s all this about emissaries from ‘on high’ suddenly lobbed into the narrative like a stun-grenade? Well, Beelzebub, goes on to explain . . .

On Earth, he says, there are – and always have been – two basic types of religious teaching. The first consists of those born from humanity’s own disposition to fantastical and delusional imaginings; pure invention in other words. The second type, in contrast, is based on detailed instructions dispensed by genuine messengers from The Source with the purpose of dispelling the awkward psychological after-effects of the organ kundabuffer. That organ, if we recall, was deliberately – but temporarily – implanted in mankind to prevent it being able to correctly perceive Reality while the after effects of Earth’s first ‘shock’ were being sorted out.

Before I continue, I think that what we are getting into here comes under the heading of ‘finding a guru’. I’ve been using the word ‘shock’ in this passage to describe the cataclysmic events that radically affected the development of the planet Earth and its inhabitants, and my reason for that will become clear as we progress further into this passage, but, just for now, let’s bear in mind that, more often than not, some kind of ‘shock’ or ‘force’ or energy is required to kick start change. In a way, it’s another way of expressing the Law of Threes. Just as the emotional and physical ‘centres’ demand input from the intellectual ‘centre’ for the unified being to function rationally; just as cool and reasoned authority can bring an end to the physical violence and rampant emotion of a mob; so a guru can draw together and soothe the existential fear of erring disciples. There is, of course, a heck of a lot more to this, but what I think I’m getting at here is that this sudden injection into the narrative of dudes on a mission from above needs, for now anyway, to be given a little bit of context and interpreted as a metaphor for the Application of Pure Reason (capital letters intended). OK, let’s carry on . .

According to Beelzebub, Saint Buddha had to be sent to India by the Cosmic Hierarchy because people of influence there (I am assuming the normal suspects here; that is, what passed for priests and officials of the ruling classes) were putting about such totally ridiculous ideas that it messed with people’s psyches to the extent that the correct energy exchange necessary for maintaining the multiversal balance – that’s everything from the Okidanokh interchange within three-brained beings to the correct emanations needed to maintain the inter-planetary dance – was being severely hindered.

Saint Buddha, then, was ‘coated’ with the planetary body necessary for survival on Earth; that is, his/her/its astral body and/or spirit/soul was incarnated into human form. Beelzebub says this happened ‘several centuries’ before his own visit but we can’t read anything into that as the various ‘incarnations’ of the Buddha are said to go way back into remote prehistory. Beelzebub pauses here to make a very interesting distinction. He explains to Hassein that the derogatory term he often uses to describe some humans – hasnamusses – applies to those who have not yet managed to crystallise within themselves the ‘Divine Impulse of Objective Conscience’, which I read to mean that they have not yet developed the application of Objective Reason (with a capital O and R) to be their absolutely-without-fail first resort when reacting to, or dealing with, anything and everything with which they are faced. But what’s really interesting, here, is that Beelzebub says hasnamuss does not necessarily refer to only a human that has not yet managed to coat their first, planetary (or physical) body with the higher (astral or spirit/soul) bodies. He insinuates that the term can also refer to a human who has already managed to acquire one or both of those higher-being coatings. Now, isn’t that interesting? It would imply, to my way of thinking, that there’s a bit of a grading system going on here. Perhaps it is the constant tension of the energy state exchange that creates those higher-being bodies, but achieving that merely puts you on the first rung of the wider psychic-spiritual evolutionary ladder. Sure, by reuniting your Okidanokh into a form that feeds back to nourish The Source and keep the cosmic machine ticking over, you have done a good thing, and a by-product is a ‘you’ that will, in some form or state, survive physical death; but, you still have work to do on yourself in the form of perfecting your Objective Reason. I suppose it’s a bit like University. You get a BA – that’s good, it puts you in the race. You go on and get a Masters – that’s better. You go the whole hog and do a PhD – that’s better still. I can’t dwell overmuch on that concept here (that is, the concept that the higher-being bodies depend for their formation on an inner ‘friction’ between the three centres which is based more on  the energy it takes to perform than any real moral quality) as Gurdjieff does enlarge on it a lot more as the work progresses; but it does kind of reinforce the idea that if you don’t bother working at all on yourself in life to create the energy required by the Cosmos for its upkeep, then that’s the end of it for you as an individual. But, if you do make the effort, you get to ‘continue’ somehow; and if you really, really make the effort, you get to up the role you play in the whole multiversal shebang. But we’ll come back to that again in later episodes.

So, this Saint Buddha, having thought about it for a while, decided that his best approach to fixing the unfocused thinking of the people of Pearl Land was to see if he could ‘enlighten’ their Reason. Beelzebub explains that the Holy Envoy had already worked out that the humans he was sent to sort out were operating under a form of pseudo-reason that he calls ‘instincto-terebelnian’; but, again, we don’t have to worry about Gurdjieff’s weird terminology, because he simply means a reason that is based on reaction to external stimuli. In other words, Saint Buddha was sent to deal to a large population of knee-jerk over-reactors – people who responded to what life threw at them in a totally instinctive and subjective, rather than objective, way. The ancient Greek and Roman (but especially Greek) philosophers wrote screeds about this type of thing, but we haven’t time to go down that rabbit-hole here.

The serene Buddha dude gathered together some of the human leaders and began by laying down some Cosmic fundamentals, or, as Beelzebub prefers to call them, some ‘Objective Truths’. The first thunderbolt (at least, to them) he delivered was that every human is essentially a Mini-Me of The Source, but his or her potential is being held back, hence the Buddha’s mission. That idea is, of course, nothing new as it appears in many teachings: Man is made in God’s image, As Above so Below, Man is a microcosm of the cosmic macrocosm, and so on. Having delivered that message to his general audience, which he collectively describes as humans who simply carry the potential; that is, the blueprint to be useful to the overall cosmic plan, The Buddha then enlarged on his mission to a more select band of followers whom he describes as those who were already actualising their function in the multiverse (in other words, those who had already gone some way to uniting the Okidanokh within themselves and had begun the process of higher-being body coating). To this group of ‘initiates’, he explains why the organ kundabuffer had to be implanted in mankind (more revision of earlier chapters by Gurdjieff) and how its effect of skewing humanity’s perception of objective reality had become engrained, even after the organ had been removed.

The Buddha reveals that The Source, realising that humanity was still in trouble, had sent an earlier Holy Envoy, incarnated into human form, to help educate it out of its bad psycho-spiritual habits. Unfortunately, although said Holy Envoy met with limited success and managed to put a few humans back on the right track, the human lifespan had become considerably shortened and The Source’s messenger suffered the Sacred Rascooarno (aka death) before he could finish the job, and everything reverted back to the way it was within a couple of generations.

As with so many things in our lives – and with most teachings – humanity decided to pick away at that first Envoy’s words and – reading between Gurdjieff’s lines – the real message became lost when too many so-called ‘experts’ started tampering with the unalloyed Truth (with a capita T) and spinning it with their own ‘authoritative’ versions; more often than not to their own personal advantage.

So The Source tried again with another Holy Envoy. And another. And another. And another, and always with the same result, right up to the time of the mission of Saint Buddha himself. Buddha explained that he had been sent to try to stop the rot for good because the failure of humanity to play its rightful part in the cosmic scheme of things was beginning to seriously impact the balance of the Solar System. At this point, Beelzebub reminds us that humanity’s plight was not all of its own making (it stemmed from a ‘Higher Order’ cock-up and lack of foresight), although I, personally, suspect this is an allegorical clarion call to humanity to get off its collective backside and put in the effort to sort out our own messes. After all, we didn’t ask to be born, so just being here is not our fault, but we have been given the inner equipment to give ourselves a leg up out of whatever quagmires we find ourselves in – if we make the effort to use it.

Saint Buddha then went on to explain how humans should be leading their lives which, in a nutshell, entails that the Positive part (which, we recall, is centred in the head and, therefore must equate to our intellectual capacity for Reason) must consciously (very important word, that) direct how the unconscious parts (which must be the emotional and physical centres) function – which is just a fancy way of saying that we have to employ Objective Reason before we let our passions have their way; in other words, we have to train our heads to rule our hearts to prevent knee-jerk reactions to life.

Again, a little aside here on a personal note. I remember my first reaction to reading about the Stoic philosophical school’s approach to life, and my first impression was far from favourable. The Stoics, you see, thought that the Universe was unfolding in a totally predetermined way and that humans had no say in their own destiny, and even that the Stoic version of a ‘God’ or ‘Source’ was entirely beyond the power of mankind to entreat. So the best response, they said, was to fortify your mind against all the things – good and bad – that that fatalistic and, ultimately, uncaring Universe was going to throw at you, so that you could take it all on the chin and get on with things. And I thought what a cop out! I felt that to adopt that kind of mentality would be to cheat oneself of the whole gamut of human emotions and become a kind of sterile-minded automaton, a robot that would never understand and learn from the roller-coaster fury of the human condition. But then I realised that that reaction of mine was exactly why the Stoics thought the way they did. My initial reaction had been a knee-jerk one. I didn’t employ my Reason and think the whole thing through. I then realised that what Gurdjieff (through Beelzebub) and the Stoics (although I’ve got other bones to pick with that lot) are saying is not that you should not have emotions/passions – because, bar the odd person with alexithymia (the inability to feel emotion) the need to emote is hard-wired into all of us – but that emotions and passions should be subservient to Objective Reason and that Objective Reason alone should be what dictates how we react to the people and world around us. I finally came to understand that it is OK – healthy, even – to have emotions, but the key was to employ my Reason to understand why I was experiencing those emotions before taking any kind of action (if any). And I know that all sounds like basic common sense but, believe you me, it’s a hell of a lot harder to put into practice than to just write down.

And just before I dive back into the text again, there’s also this to consider: The ‘friction’ – the ‘conflict’ almost – you feel within yourself when you are trying your absolute damnedest to rein in, for instance, the impulse to throttle someone who has unjustly upset you, is your Objective Reason attempting to control your passion. In other words, your Intellectual centre is attempting to gain control of your emotional and motor centres. In other other words, the three strands of your Okidanokh are attempting to act in concert – and it is precisely that kind of energy, that kind of friction, that provides the ‘food’ to begin the coating of your higher-being bodies. So you can kind of see, in that small example I’ve just given, what I think Gurdjieff was saying earlier in this passage; that is, that the energy required for the coating of higher-being bodies is, more-or-less, morally neutral; after all, there’s nothing much Universe-enhancing in barely restraining yourself from strangling some twat who probably thoroughly deserves it – it was the energy required to overcome the impulse that mattered. To my way of looking at this, using your Objective Reason to internally unite the three strands of the Okidanokh is the starting point, in that it creates the energy for the formation of the higher-being bodies. But it is how you then proactively and consciously function once those bodies are coated that determines your psycho-spiritual evolution and the role you will go on to play within the wider cosmic machine. Gurdjieff will explain more about this concept later in the work but it’s worth keeping in mind that his protagonist, Beelzebub, is very much an example of this spiritual ‘job promotion’ in action as Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson progresses. Bit of a longer aside than I’d anticipated there, but back to the narrative . . .

So Saint Buddha, by preaching the application of Reason over emotion, started to make some headway and many humans began to disentangle themselves from the after-effects of the organ kundabuffer. Nevertheless, once the Buddha died, the very next generation started to distort his teachings, and so it continued until, by the third or fourth generation after his lifetime, the precepts the Buddha had taught would have been unrecognisable even to the Saint himself.

Beelzebub explains to his grandson, Hassein, that, in the case of the Buddha, the main reason for the bastardisation of his teachings was a total misunderstanding of one of his central tenets – a misunderstanding that is still evident even today. According to Beelzebub, the Buddha had taught that one of the best ways for humanity to ‘train’ itself out of the consequences of the organ kundabuffer was through ‘intentional-suffering’, and one of the best situations in which to practise that concept was by forcing yourself to rein in your reactions during confrontations with people who were – in whatever way it manifested – being unpleasant towards you.

Unfortunately, that piece of superb advice (the essence of which I’ve kind of touched on in my aside above) was twisted by the succeeding generations, who felt that the internal ‘struggle’, the ‘endurance’ referred to by Saint Buddha could only be achieved in complete solitude. They thereby missed the entire point, because it is only by direct exposure to the unpleasantness of others that we can truly ‘experience’ the inner struggle to keep our cool, and it is the energy created by that inner struggle that kicks in what Gurdjieff calls the ‘psychic-chemical-results’ that result in fortifying the positive or affirming force within ourselves to counterbalance and overcome our negative inclinations. In short, exposing ourselves to the hostility of others without reacting is good practice for building our Objective Reason which, in turn, is a positive force for converting energy to that quality required by The Source to keep everything going; and it has the added benefit of building our own higher-being bodies so that we look like potential ‘management material’ to All and Everything.

But the inhabitants of Pearl Land didn’t ‘get it’ and, either individually or in small communities (retreats and monasteries in other words), isolated themselves from the ‘training ground’ of normal human life in an attempt to ‘save their souls’; and this was seen as a perfectly acceptable facet of the religion based on the teachings of Saint Buddha which the majority of Pearl Land’s inhabitants were practising at the time of Beelzebub’s first visit to that country.

Beelzebub still had to work out exactly how he was going to slow down ritual animal sacrifice in Pearl Land and he eventually settled on taking advantage of another teaching of Saint Buddha that had resulted in a misunderstanding. But first, Beelzebub explains the ‘Cosmic Truth’ that the Buddha had revealed, and it is very interesting as Gurdjieff uses the Buddha’s explanation to precis and revise the mechanics of his own cosmology – as we’ve heard it so far – in a couple of short paragraphs. It’s a bit technical so I’ll do my best to simplify it to what I think Gurdjieff is saying:

All three-brained beings on all planets of the multiverse, humanity included, are essential parts of an inclusive and embracing Whole which is The Source itself. The Source radiates itself continuously and renews itself from three-brained beings seeded on planets in whom, through a proper realisation of the two fundamental cosmic laws – The Law of Sevens and The Law of Threes – Objective Divine Reason becomes concentrated and fixed.

There’s a bit more there about three-brained souls who have attained a level of spirituality through Divine Reason reuniting with The Whole, but I kind of boil the whole thing down to its being a description of the self-sustaining, perpetual-motion anti-entropy device I’ve discussed in previous chapters. Gurdjieff, through Beelzebub and Saint Buddha, then goes on to describe the process of the correct application of the Laws of Seven and Three to the coating of ourselves with higher-being bodies and their fine-tuning through the use of Objective Reason, as Holy Prana (from the Sanskrit word meaning breath and as embodied in Hinduism – and some yogic schools – as the concept of the holy or divine breath).

Now, in my opinion, Gurdjieff’s jumped the gun a bit there, because we’ve not really had much explanation, thus far, about the Law of Sevens, but we shouldn’t get too bogged down because, at this point, the good old inhabitants of Pearl Land managed once again to mess up the pure message behind the Buddha’s teaching. Within three generations, says Beelzebub, the followers of Buddha’s religion had forgotten all about the critical element of having to strive to coat themselves with the higher-being bodies, and instead just assumed that ‘Mr. Prana’ was with them from birth. In other words, they considered themselves a fully functional part of the holy, cosmic whole without having to do a second’s worth of work on themselves – something the Buddha had made perfectly clear was not the case. And it’s worth remembering, here, that Gurdjieff has previously implied that, if you don’t put the effort into reuniting (and, thereby, ‘re-energising’) the three strands of the Okidanokh which separate and reside in your three centres at birth, then those three strands, because you’ve not bothered to transmute them into something to replenish The Source, will, on your physical death, zip off back into the multiverse in their original ‘unre-energised’ state to seek out a less lazy host – and that’s that for you as an ‘individual’.

I recently came across the process of ‘fuel polishing’ which involves passing degraded diesel from a tank through a purification device, and Gurdjieff’s universe-as-an-energy-recycling-system is a bit like that. In that analogy, the machine containing the tank is the Universe, the diesel is the okidanokh, and humans (or any other three-brained beings) are the purification devices. If the purification devices are working as they’ve been designed, the diesel in the tank is kept healthy and the machine runs well. If the purification devices don’t do the job for which they’re designed, the diesel in the tank degrades and the whole machine grinds to a halt. So The Source does what any good mechanic would and, when one purification device won’t do its job, He/She/It replaces it with another that will.

But what Beelzebub next tells Hassein, his grandson, is absolutely fascinating, because, with it, Gurdjieff, for the first time in the work and totally out of the blue, begins to hint at an almost intermediate stage in human psycho-spiritual development – a state somewhere between not having any higher-being coating and one in which the higher-being bodies are fully perfected. According to Beelzebub, Saint Buddha had expressly told his disciples that, once you begin the process of crystallising your higher-being bodies – whether you are ware of having done so or not – it is imperative that you employ your Reason to complete the process because, if you do not, ‘this most holy coating will, changing various exterior coatings, suffer and languish eternally’. Beelzebub follows this up with another dire warning, this time from another Holy Envoy who was sent to Earth from The Source, one Saint Kirmininasha, who said: ‘Blessed is he that hath a soul; blessed also is he that hath none; but grief and sorrow are to him that hath in himself its conception’.

Crikey! What are we meant to make of that? On the face of it, Gurdjieff is saying that there’s some kind of level of individual existence that transcends the death of the physical body but cannot realise its full potential of ‘reuniting’ with The Source. There’s even a hint in the ‘changing various exterior coatings’ statement of the possibility of existence through several reincarnations, or even wandering the Earth like an old ghost. All very esoteric and mysterious, yes, but we must always keep in mind that Gurdjieff writes on several different levels and there is also a much more psychologically prosaic way of reading this passage as it could equally be interpreted as Gurdjieff warning us that, once you start on the path to self-evolution, it’s better to finish the job on yourself than to get stuck at some intermediate stage where you’re neither one thing nor the other and your life is made a misery by the confusion of incomplete understanding and the guilt of not fulfilling what you started. Those who never bother, or don’t even contemplate, psycho-spiritual evolution live in ignorance of it; those who achieve it live enriched lives; but those who start and get stuck on the path often beat themselves up for what could have been. Of course, both above interpretations of this very strange passage could be correct – or it could mean something else entirely. But whatever Gurdjieff really does intend it to mean, he doesn’t enlarge on at this point and we move on to how Beelzebub solved the problem of animal sacrifice in Pearl Land.

Having decided to play on a facet of the already established religion (just as he did in Maralpleicie) Beelzebub started to put it about that this ‘Holy Prana’ that everybody already assumed was theirs by right of being born, was present not only in humans but in every creature born on planet Earth, whether it be found in the sea, on land, or in the air. Although Beelzebub knew that was not the true doctrine of Saint Buddha (who had said that ‘Holy Prana’ was the result of hard self-work in three-brained beings) he assured those he chose to seed the message that it was, and sent them on their way to spread the word. The effect was immediate and the practice of ritual animal sacrifice came grinding to a halt as the inhabitants of Pearl Land began to regard all creatures as equal to themselves.

But, just like in Maralpleicie, and humans being humans, the message was embellished and distorted and people started taking their new ‘understanding’ to comical extremes. Some walked on stilts to avoid crushing insects; others wouldn’t drink fresh water because they might inadvertently swallow the small creatures living in it; still others wore face masks to avoid accidentally inhaling insects. Societies grew up to protect animals both domesticated and wild, and rules were put in place to forbid the consumption of any kind of animal flesh. And, yes, for Beelzebub, it was mission complete because he had massively reduced animal sacrifice, but for Saint Buddha and all those Holy Envoys who preceded him it was same old-same old as humanity continued to distort the true message behind their words. According to Beelzebub, all we humans did with the Objective Truth of our existence was twist it out of all shape into so-called teachings such as Occultism, Theosophy, Spiritualism, and Psychoanalysis, all of which serve only to muddle our already muddled psyches.

Gurdjieff winds up this chapter with another strange little passage. In it Beelzebub tells Hassein that the only thing to have survived from the teachings of Saint Buddha was ‘half a word’. That word concerns the location in the human body at which the organ kundabuffer had been caused to grow, which was, apparently, at the base of the spine. Now, we have to remember that the spinal column is referred to by Beelzebub as one of the ‘brains’ of a three-brained being and he has mentioned that it is the seat of the Holy Denying, or Negative stream of the Okidanokh. According to Beelzebub, although the organ no longer functions as such, it is still present in humans as an obsolete bodily formation. He then goes on to explain how humans have mangled the semantics of the original name of the organ and arrived contemporarily at kundalina which is, of course, the yogic kundalini force believed to coil around the base of the spine. Now, Beelzebub does say that the modern use of the word figures prominently in what he calls ‘Indian Philosophy’ but he dismisses any ‘secrets’ or sciences that purport to explain it as quite fanciful.

And as if that wasn’t strange enough, Beelzebub leaves us with a bemusing puzzle. He says that the way modern scientists define the significance of the location of the now defunct organ kundabuffer in the marrow in the lower spinal column is a ‘profound secret’ which ‘entered’ the favourite mole on the right side of the famous Scheherazade’s navel. I’ve absolutely no idea what that’s all about (if anything) so make of it what you will.

So, I think that, for us at this juncture, we only need to take away from that little aside that the yogic energy kundalini is considered a female energy which ‘equates’ with its negative assignation in Gurdjieff’s terminology involving the Law of Threes (remember he introduced his wife-to-be as the ‘negative’ aspect to his own ‘positive’ one), and that Beelzebub explains the organ’s location as ‘that part of the spinal marrow’. There are a lot of similarities – even parallels – between Gurdjieff’s Laws of Three and Seven and many other teachings and philosophies, but they are too many to get into just yet.

This chapter on Beelzebub’s first visit to India finally ends – phew! – with him deciding to head back to his spaceship, but, rather than going by the most direct route, Beelzebub decides to travel through that locality that would later be called Tibet.

Well, that was a massive revision chapter (with a few new concepts thrown in) and we’re beginning to see some themes running together. For one thing, it’s amazing how everything seems to boil down to the change of energy states to keep everything going. Modern quantum physics, with its collapsing probability waves, and its quarks and strings, all vibrating away at different frequencies to ‘create’ the basic building blocks of everything (which collide and change identity and charge), tells much the same story as Gurdjieff with his permanent standing wave of energy that ‘collapses’ into every type of ‘thing’ (suns, planets, one-, two-, and three-brained beings) and then separates and mutates and recombines into something else. There is an awful lot of so-called ‘esoteric’ knowledge floating around this world which, it seems to me, modern science is only just catching up with . . . but enough of that for now.

As far as self-help aspects of this chapter are concerned, well, like Gurdjieff’s subject matter, it’s pretty much a revision session. One message that comes through strongly is that changes to existing energy levels – or an injection of new energy –  are often needed to kick-start reactions that will jolt us out of a rut or bad habits. In Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson that energy comes in the form of Beelzebub himself and his ‘ruses’ to jolt people out of a pre-set mental attitude and start a chain reaction to achieve change; although it could equally come, in our lives, from a friend, a relative, even a book. The energy arrives in our lives in some form or other but then it’s up to us what we do with it. After all, the term guru simply means a teacher in Sanskrit; it’d be a mistake to always assume that your guru is going to be a person – experience, after all, is often seen as one of the best teachers of the lot.

There is one other thing that cropped up in this chapter worth mentioning as regards self-help, and that’s when Beelzebub talked about subjecting yourself to the hostility of others in order to master the art of inner control which generates fuel to build your higher-being bodies. Now, I’m not advocating that we all go around deliberately winding people up just so that we can perfect our self-control and hasten our personal spiritual evolution, but there’s a wider point here. Keeping your cool in an inflammatory situation is, in my opinion, an essential survival trait and one that’s worth cultivating; but there are other ways of generating that ‘friction’ which forces your inner centres to sort out a working relationship; and they can be found in all sorts of situations. I remember reading an account of Gurdjieff’s when he related the anecdote about a mountain bandit (or it may have been a hunter) waiting to ambush his quarry. The man developed an itch on the side of his nose but was aware that even the slightest movement would betray his position and warn his prey. The more he was aware of the itch, the more acute his desire to scratch it became. That inner struggle, the man’s Reason overriding his emotional and physical impulse to raise his hand and scratch his nose – a  movement he knew would disadvantage him – was enough to generate fuel for his higher-being bodies. He wasn’t aware that’s what was happening, he just wanted to ambush his prey without being spotted, but it was happening whether he wanted it to or not. Now, that’s a pretty extreme example but there are more prosaic ways: resisting the temptation to scoff the bottom layer of the chocolate box, for instance, or forcing yourself to do that exam revision you’ve been putting off for days and days, or keeping your mouth shut when you really want to grandstand and show off how much you know even though it’ll make you look like Hermione Granger – the possibilities are everywhere. So the self-help lesson is: use your noddle and think before you give in to what your emotions or physical urges want you to do. Your passions and your body can be very persuasive and demanding but you can overrule them if you try hard enough. And that’s a big enough win even if you don’t believe in all that higher-being stuff; but if you do, well then, it’s a double-whammy.

That really is enough for now. I hope to see you next time when Beelzebub pays his first visit to Tibet.