Good and Evil in Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, Part V: The Hasnamuss

 

 Part V of a seven-part series

In examining the question of evil in Gurdjieff’s writings, one inevitably comes up against the question of whether it exists at all as an “objective” force. 

In his chapter on justice, Gurdjieff seems to conclusively dismiss the idea that evil can exist objectively from outside a person and “flow into them;” and in this — unusually, as it happens — he deviates substantially from cosmological viewpoints expressed by Emmanuel Swedenborg. Much of Swedenborg’s theology—in revelations he claims to have received directly from God, a claim not taken lightly — rests on this very idea. 

Elsewhere in Gurdjieff’s cosmology, he brings up the concept of the “Hasnamuss,” which is worthy of examination in regard to this question.

The first time that we encounter a definition of the word in Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson is in the following passage: 

..this word designates every already ‘definitized’ common presence of a three-brained being, both those consisting only of the single planetary body as well as those whose higher being-bodies are already coated in them, and in which for some reason or other, data have not been crystallized for the Divine impulse of ‘Objective-Conscience’. 

Because the “higher being bodies” are, by definition in Beelzebub’s cosmology, metaphysical bodies existing on the astral (planetary) or even higher levels, it’s clear enough that subjective elements are capable of existing even at higher levels. Because Beelzebub himself, in the narrative, committed transgressions that fell into this category, we can have no doubt of this as not just a casual, but rather essential, premise in the cosmology. 

As to the behavior of such individuals, it is characterized by features such as greed and atheism:

“…a three-brained learned being by name Harnahoom—whose essence later became crystallized into what is called an ‘Eternal-Hasnamussian-individual’—invented that any old metal you like, abundant on the surface of that planet, could easily be turned into the rare metal ‘gold’ and all it was necessary to know for this was just one very small ‘secret’. “This maleficent fiction of his became widely spread there, and…began to pass to the beings of subsequent generations as a gradually formed definite maleficent fantastic science there, under the name of ‘alchemy’…“And as at that period to which my tale relates, this Persian king needed for some or other of his undoubtedly Hasnamussian aims, a great deal of this metal, rare on the surface of the Earth, called ‘gold’, and as the notion concerning this method that had been invented by the then existing ‘Hasnamussian-individual’, Harnahoom, had also reached his presence, he was eager to get gold by so easy a means. 

First case in point. Here we are presented with subjective or “evil” influences that definitely flow into others.

The second case in point as follows:

The second Babylonian teaching which then had many followers, and which, passing from generation to generation, also reached your contemporary favorites, was… one of the atheistic teachings of that period. 

“In this teaching by the terrestrial Hasnamussian candidates of that time, it was stated that there is no God in the world, and moreover no soul in man, and hence that all those talks and discussions about the soul are nothing more than the deliriums of sick visionaries. 

“It was further maintained that there exists in the World only one special law of mechanics, according to which everything that exists passes from one form into another; that is to say, the results which arise from certain preceding causes are gradually transformed and become causes for subsequent results. “

nb. This particular description is that selfsame cosmological philosophy I refer to as “mechanistic rationalism” in my book “Metaphysical Humanism.”

“Man also is therefore only a consequence of some preceding cause and in his turn must, as a result, be a cause of certain consequences. 

“Further, it was said that even what are called ‘super-natural phenomena’ really perceptible to most people, are all nothing but these same results ensuing from the mentioned special law of mechanics. 

“The full comprehension of this law by the pure Reason depends on the gradual impartial, all-round acquaintance with its numerous details which can be revealed to a pure Reason in proportion to its development.

 “But as regards the Reason of man, this is only the sum of all the impressions perceived by him, from which there gradually arise in him data for comparisons, deductions, and conclusions. 

“As a result of all this, he obtains more information concerning all kinds of similarly repeated facts around him, which in the general organization of man are in their turn material for the formation of definite convictions in him. Thus, from all this there is formed in man—Reason, that is to say, his own subjective psyche. 

“Whatever may have been said in these two teachings about the soul, and whatever maleficent means had been prepared by those learned beings assembled there from almost the whole planet for the gradual transformation of the Reason of their descendants into a veritable mill of nonsense, it would not have been, in the objective sense, totally calamitous; but the whole objective terror is concealed in the fact that there later resulted from these teachings a great evil, not only for their descendants alone, but maybe even for everything existing. 

This particular passage not only denotes a specific set of subjective influences flowing into people from outside sources; from them arises an evil. So from this we can conclude that in Gurdjieff’s eyes, the question of objective external evils and the way in which they influence people is a bit more complicated than what we encounter in his discourse on justice in chapter 44.

In the largest and most general sense, then, Gurdjieff proposes a universe in which subjective elements are able to “crystallize,” or concentrate themselves and acquire force, both within individual humans and in metaphysical contexts (higher being bodies.) These forces can be great; and they can produce great evils. The whole idea of Hasnamuss-individuals, which is mentioned throughout the book, embodies this principle.

The struggle between good and evil, then, is recast in Gurdjieff’s eyes as a struggle between the objective and subjective.

While this appears to differ substantially from Swedenborg’s perspective, they have a point of contact in the idea of the objective as unselfish (in Gurdjieff’s terms, “pure”) and the subjective as selfish (admixed with the personal.) And indeed, when we encounter Gurdjieff’s discourse on the exact qualities of a Hasnamuss-individual, they’re all entirely selfish:

(1) Every kind of depravity, conscious as well as unconscious

(2) The feeling of self-satisfaction from leading others astray

(3) The irresistible inclination to destroy the existence of other breathing creatures

(4) The urge to become free from the necessity of actualizing the being-efforts demanded by Nature

(5) The attempt by every kind of artificiality to conceal from others what in their opinion are one’s physical

defects

(6) The calm self-contentment in the use of what is not personally deserved

(7) The striving to be not what one is.

One of the first and thus primary characteristics of a Hasnamuss individual is referred to as “conscious” depravity. This elevates the nature of the characteristic to intention, rather than automatism; and it is significant, because it assigns the quality of intentional perversion to a being that has acquired objective consciousness. This whole list is merely a fancy way of saying that they are bad people; the seven characteristics constitute, in their entirety, a description of evil behavior.

Here, in other words, evil is assigned a materiality… a metaphysical materiality. While it arises in individuals, its influences can spread throughout the universe, endangering everyone; and this is precisely because of the influential effect it has on others, which is metaphysical and consists of a “flowing in” of the subjective properties of Hasnamuss individuals into others around them.

Crafted as it is in a group of seven characteristics, the nature of a Hasnamuss reveals itself as a form of inner, metaphysical (spiritual) development. It proceeds according to the laws of the octave, but with a negative manifestation of each of the notes.

First, the three physical parts of that development as seen on the right side of the enneagram:

(1) Every kind of depravity, conscious as well as unconscious.

Re, the material creation of a world of depravity.

(2) The feeling of self-satisfaction from leading others astray.

Mi, the emotional center of that world, which consists of the act of pleasing oneself.

(3) The irresistible inclination to destroy the existence of other breathing creatures.

Fa, the locus of force and power, which is used not just to harm others, but to kill them.

This consists of the physical or natural, outer side of the Hasnamuss as they manifest in the world. The next three notes represent the left side of the enneagram, the metaphysical “anti-being” of the Hasnamuss:

(4) The urge to become free from the necessity of actualizing the being-efforts demanded by Nature.

Sol, the arising of an anti-being whose wish is opposed to the natural order.

(5) The attempt by every kind of artificiality to conceal from others what in their opinion are one’s physical defects.

La, the preservation of corruption as opposed to its purification. 

(6) The calm self-contentment in the use of what is not personally deserved.

Si, the exercise of an anti-– wisdom, which is the apotheosis of selfishness.

(7) The striving to be not what one is.

Do, the absolute. We can construe this as being the alpha and omega of the universe of the Hasnamuss, and it is an Absolute of lying.

The proposition that the Hasnamuss represents an anti-being relates the concept directly to the idea of the antichrist; and since the development of the Christ, in terms of the octave, proceeds along the lines of Gurdjieff’s man’s numbers 1 through 7, we can see the logic here: Hasnamuss number seven is, in its essence, the antichrist of Gurdjieff’s mythological and cosmological model. 

It implies a negative consciousness; and as such it embodies the very idea of a force of “external” evil that can influence that which is around it: Gurdjieff’s black magician. I think we uncover here subtleties and undercurrents that belie any supposition that Gurdjieff eschewed either the idea of evil itself, or the idea that it did not exist objectively, in its own sense, outside of the subjective characteristics of human beings. It is a force that develops: and it is furthermore a force that can reach to the highest levels of development or consciousness, as described in his character Lentrohamsanin.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Good and Evil in Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, Part IV: Purity

  Part IV of a seven-part series

 "However it may have been, my boy, the detailed and impartial research I made on the spot brought to light the following: "When that idea had gradually taken on this maleficent form, it became for the psyche of your favorites what is called a 'determining factor' for the crystallization of data in their common presence for the fantastic notion that there exist, as it were, outside of them objective sources of 'Good' and 'Evil' which act upon their essence.

Here we come to what is perhaps the most salient point in Gurdjieff’s perspective: human beings assign these properties of “good” and “evil” to objects, events, circumstances, and conditions outside of themselves. This is problematic from multiple points of view; but the most important problem it poses us is that it becomes an immediate denial of the very agency that human beings are meant to exercise as mediators of the reconciling factor. It is an abrogation of duty; and that simple fact in itself carries a great weight in light of Gurdjieff’s tremendous emphasis on being – duty.

This action outsources the responsibility for what takes place to others. It creates, among other things, a world of blame; it is a refusal to accept one’s own responsibility and one’s own agency, and action most typical of little children. Yet of course we don’t fully outgrow that in a lifetime; and in that regard, perhaps we are reminded of St. Paul’s comment on what it means to become a human being in 1 Corinthians 13:

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. “

It’s no coincidence that this passage is embedded in the Corinthians passage about love, which Gurdjieff mentions in the meaning of life as “that which can lead us to the miraculous.”

Take note that Gurdjieff does not say good and evil don’t exist; his suggestion is that they don’t have an objective existence outside us. We are fully and wholly responsible for the good and bad that is done; yet our assignment of that quality to something outside ourselves excuses us from the need to struggle with our own question about what is good and bad. We might note that the “inner evil God of self calming” consists, among other things, of exactly this passive suggestibility:

This strange trait of their psyche, that of being satisfied with whatever Smith or Brown says without trying to know more, became rooted in them long ago, and now they no longer make the least effort to know anything that can be understood solely by their own active reflection. (from Beelzebub’s Tales, chapter 13.)

Beelzebub extends the paradigm even further:

From then on, other peculiar data began to be crystallized in their general psyche—at first spontaneously and later owing to their strange consciousness—which engender the conviction, through automatic being-associations, that the causes of all their manifestations, both good and bad, are not to be found in themselves, in their own criminal essence-egoism, but in some external influence not depending on them at all. 

There is a certain naïveté implicit in this worldview, to be sure; but I think we can agree that in the absence of serious inward, self-directed critical examination, every human being is prone to exactly this kind of attitude. The whole point of Gurdjieff’s self observation is, among other things, to see this.

"The fundamental harm ensuing from this fantastic idea for all these unfortunates is that, thanks as always to the abnormal conditions of ordinary being-existence established by them themselves, data cease to be crystallized in them for engendering what is called a 'being-world-view with diverse aspects', and instead of this a 'world-view' is formed in them based exclusively on that maleficent idea of external Good and Evil. 

What we end up with is a polarized perspective. Without being aware of it, we narrow the range of our critical intelligence into a single channel unable to appreciate the diverse and changing nature of the world that we live in and the inner nature of our own being. This actually cripples our agency; we become machines, slaves.

Once internalized, this becomes the basis for every kind of self abuse, since we develop an inner mirror reflecting our ideas about the outer world. This is a reciprocal process; once it crystallizes, it is nearly impossible to escape the reflexive action which blames everything but how we are unto ourselves.

"And indeed at the present time, your favorites base all questions without exception—those about ordinary being-existence as well as those about self-perfecting and about 'philosophies' and 'sciences' of every kind, and of course their innumerable 'religious teachings,' not to mention their notorious 'morals,' 'politics,' 'laws,' 'ethics,' and so on— exclusively on that fantastic and for them in the objective sense pernicious idea.

This last passage presents us with more of a dilemma. It tends to throw the baby out with the bathwater; and begins in several disturbing ways to represent some of the rants which Gurdjieff embeds in his texts. He does, after all, endorse any number of actions in these same spheres as long as they conform to what he calls objective consciousness, objective law, or objective science; so it isn’t the activities themselves which he condemns. It’s the nature of their arising, the source of their content.

It would be easy to mistake otherwise; it sounds like he is dismissing everything we do in these areas. Yet what he is dismissing is our subjectivity in these matters, not the matters themselves. There is a need for philosophy, science, morality, politics, law, and ethics; but the need is an objective one, and our subjectivity, our selfishness, and our refusal to accept responsibility for our own being and action in these areas is what corrupts them. A closer reading of the essay The Meaning of Life will remind the reader that he said exactly this in that piece: 

“There can be any impersonal envy; for example, envy of one who has conquered himself. An impersonal hate: the hate of injustice, of brutality. Impersonal anger — against stupidity, hypocrisy… love of science can be pure, or mixed with personal profit… the same is true in art, literature, etc. The love of activity is a worthy sentiment when it is pure. But what happens, invariably, is that it becomes mixed… Pride, vanity, personal ambition enter in.”

Gurdjieff, in other words, is not and never was and iconoclast of ordinary institutions, ordinary activity. He was not a denier of the existence of objective good. What he was an iconoclast of was subjectivity; of egoism. And this is a very different thing indeed.

Our institutions, our societies, and our attitudes are built out of the selfsame subjectivities, which arise from the outsourcing of personal responsibility for thinking critically, for not believing every other person who comes along selling snake oil. Our inner attitude arises from our assumptions and what we have been told; not what we discover for ourselves through conscious labor and intentional suffering. 

The evil inner God of self calming, in other words, is an outsourcing of responsibility for what Gurdjieff would have called active being-mentation. This is the role that third force takes on in life; and it calls for a diversity of thinking, a flexibility. His very use of the word crystallization implies a rigidity that does not allow for further development; and our outward ideas of good and evil are catalysts for that action.

We must become inwardly responsible for good and evil, within ourselves; and that is a tall order indeed.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Good and Evil in Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, Part III: Third Force

  Part III of a seven-part series

The remaining fraction of this mechanism represents third force, the “holy reconciling” factor in Gurdjieff’s Trinitarian cosmology. This force acts as an inner part of man’s being according to the law of his formation as a mirror of larger cosmic processes. It corresponds to Meister Eckhart’s ground of the soul, that middle meeting place between the divine inflow and the outward action of agency in which an exchange takes place.

Gurdjieff describes this force as the result of the clash of inner and outer properties; and this represents some significant conceptual and theological challenges, because describing it as a result implies that it does not have an independent nature; and I believe it reasonable to point out here that the general conception of third force as considered by Gurdjieff pupils — as well as the general conception of the Holy Ghost — is that of a force or agency owning an independent identity distinct from the other two forces.

It poses further theological challenges in light of Christian teaching, because in Christian teaching the traditional structure of engenderment is Father – Holy Ghost – Son. Gurdjieff’s description asserts instead that the Father and the Son, taken together, give birth to the Holy Ghost; nuanced, perhaps, but also a potential heresy.

'And as for the third universal force, this is nothing but the result of the clash, everywhere and in everything, of these two fundamental, descending and ascending independent forces. " 'Although this third independent force is only the result of the first two fundamental forces, it is nevertheless the spiritualizing and reconciling principle of every cosmic formation. 

Gurdjieff describes the third force as the result of a clash between the other two forces. The word clash has imitative origins meant to reproduce the sound of a loud noise, two symbols coming together; yet it can also mean — as it does here — a struggle. We are reminded of Gurdjieff’s ray of creation, where the pressure (the momentum from the prime source) of the ray of creation is great and actually works against the struggle of creatures to ascend its hierarchy. 

Lest we doubt that this result, this third force, is not an independent entity, he reiterates that it is only (”nothing but”) the result, emphasizing its origin. This puts to lie any presumption that Gurdjieff makes room for an alternative interpretation. It furthermore imparts an exquisite irony to the traditional Gurdjieff adage that “one doesn’t work for results”: third force is a result.

Despite its dependent nature, it’s still absolutely essential, per its role as the spiritualizing and reconciling principle of every cosmic formation. 

Gurdjieff’s famous wordiness consistently belies the succinct nature of his more important statements. Much can be inferred here in this simple turn of words. First of all, we know that Gurdjieff has sketched out a very firm view of the essential nature of being. 

Being arises from within the spiritual — the divine inflow of the first force from the prime source is the “outward breath” of the divine, which is received as the “inward breath”of the material. This is the literal meaning of that which is spiritual, derived from Latin spirare, to breathe.

Yet the result of that inspiration, that breathing in of the divine by the material, is not just the cosmic formation itself (the created material) but also a lawful animation consisting of a spiritualizing principal that automatically arises. If we think about it for a moment, this is, in fact, a second spiritualization or inspiration of force; and we can liken this at once to Gurdjieff’s discussion of conscious shocks. It is a force arising automatically from the existence of the first two forces and their opposing struggle; and it animates being as a reconciling principal. It is what brings the two forces back together.

The two forces create the third force by their very existence alone; and it raises questions about the nature of third force. It can be construed, as might be typical in the geometry of the equilateral triangle, as the apex of the triangle, with affirming and denying forces lying along its base as entities on the same level and of equal value. 

In this image, the reconciling force is a higher force, located as it is at the apex of the triangle; and yet that seems peculiar, because in most conventional versions of God’s place in religious cosmology, the highest action comes from God —not from the “third force” of reconciliation between God and the material.

'And it is the spiritualizing and reconciling principle of every cosmic world-formation because it arises and must exist in them as a presence as long as there exist the results of diverse unusual mutual resistances occurring between the two fundamental forces flowing in entirely opposite direction.' 

In this phrase, we see that Gurdjieff conceives of the third force as an inevitable lawful arising as a consequence of the flow of the two opposing forces — the higher into the material, and the material back into the higher.

Understanding third force, in its Christian terms, as the Holy Spirit — Jeanne de Salzmann’s “higher energy” — we must take a further step in understanding that it represents the potential for a conscious action. As a spiritualizing force, it gives life to what is — it serves as breath, as inspiration. As a reconciling principal, it can function either mechanically or consciously; and of course Gurdjieff’s interest is in the conscious function of the third force.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Good and Evil in Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, Part II: Chapter 44

 Part II of a seven-part series

The preceding introduction is, however, just a 30,000 foot view of chapter 44. The core of mankind’s concepts of good and evil are embedded in a relatively brief passage, the kernel of the chapter, which recounts MK’s great discovery, which was later corrupted by human beings and their various religions.

The passage begins with a tripartite proposition which we can approximate as a representation of Meister Eckhart’s tripartite division of the soul. It casts itself at once as an inner proposition in which there is a part in mankind that receives emanations from the Prime Source, easily equated with Meister Eckhart’s transcendent nature of God. This describes the innermost part of the soul which receives the most intimate contact with God, equivalent to God the Father:

'It is evident that we men, like all units existing in the Universe, are formed and always consist of the same three independent forces, by means of which the process of reciprocal maintenance of everything existing is actualized, that is, the following three universal forces. 

'The first of these forces continually arises from causes appearing within the Prime Source itself from the effect of the pressure of new arisings and, issuing from it by momentum, flows out of that Prime Source. " 

This is a description of the divine inflow into being in the most intimate part of the soul. It is what gives birth to being. The iteration of man as a microcosmos identical in its construction, hierarchy, and particulars to the megalocosmos is equally explicit. It’s a description of the act of creation not just of the cosmos itself but of individual beings within it. A further nuance emerges in Gurdjieff’s remark about the “pressure of new arisings”, which serves as an indicator that creation is perpetual, takes place in eternity, and is lawful (issuing from it by momentum.) One is reminded here of Meister Eckhart’s repeated insistence that if man and his ego only get out of the way, God must flow in to the void that is created. 

Gurdjieff goes on to describe the outermost part of the soul, which would be called God the Son in Christian practice:

'The second universal force is what this first force becomes when, after having spent the momentum it had, it strives to reblend with the source of its arising, according to the fundamental cosmic law "the effects of a cause must always re-enter the cause. " 

'In the general process of reciprocal maintenance, these two forces are entirely independent, and in their manifestations always and in everything keep their own properties and characteristics. " 'The first of these two fundamental forces, the one that is always compelled to manifest outside the source of its arising, must constantly involve, and the second, on the contrary, in striving to reblend with the cause of its arising, must always and in everything evolve. " 

In this description, we encounter the transformation of the highest energy of the inflow into the external powers of the soul, which in Meister Eckhart’s conception (see the commentary on sermon one) engender agency. While the first force involves —”rolls into” — the second force evolves — literally, “rolls back out of.” Agency, in its interaction with the material, re – collects the dispersed portions of the involutionary force. By this action they are re – concentrated through effort (striving,) thereby reassimilating into the original wholeness of the original. The idea is a commonplace theme in Meister Eckhart’s sermons.

Implicit in this is the idea that the more whole they are, the more successfully they can re-blend with the cause of their arising — which is, of course, a description of Gurdjieff’s cosmological engine as presented in The Holy Planet Purgatory.

There are already some notable connections between Meister Eckhart’s vision of the soul and its functions here; yet it is a mere beginning.

'Since the first of these three independent forces arises from vivifying actions proceeding in the very foundation of the Cause of everything that exists and thus receives in its presence the germ of that same power of manifesting vivifyingness, it may be considered as "Good," that is, as a factor for the actualizing of the backward-flowing effects, which in relation to this first force can and must be considered as "Evil." 

The unfortunate misunderstanding about the nature of the words “good” and “evil” arises in this single passage. The difficulty begins here with the fact that the words are labels for lawful cosmological processes. In this descriptive passage, “good” is nothing more than the involutionary or creative force, and “evil” nothing more than the evolutionary force. Their value is not moral but objective. One disseminates vivifyingness (brings life to matter by undergoing the dissolution of its nature) and the other re-gathers that force to return it to its source.

The error — and it is an egregious error indeed on the part of MK— is that his choice of words for the evolutionary force names it “bad.” Why he chose the particular word “evil” remains entirely unclear, and Beelzebub does not offer us any clues. 

It leaves us with the question: if MK is not to blame for this choice of words, who is?

The situation arises, perhaps, as an inevitable consequence of dualism: if the involutionary force is good, the evolutionary force has to be its opposite. Yet this is a function of thinking on the order of 48 laws, in which every law from the higher level of 24 laws is reflected by an inversion of itself on this one. Such inversion does not take place on the level above us; yet we’re locked into thinking of things as composed of opposites on this level. It’s by law the very nature of the level itself.

From that perspective, it was inevitable that “good”would find its counterpart in “evil” in the minds of men; and yet we can see the sheer illogic of this concept by understanding that the very action of the evolutionary force is nothing more than an effort to return to the good. (This is not how we usually understand the word “evil.”)

That effort of return embodies both subjective (egoistic) and objective (non-– egoistic) elements and actions; and from this perspective, a further (and objective) division must be made between actions which are selfish and actions which are not. That particular division actually lies at the heart of Gurdjieff’s philosophical and theological contemplations:

“The sign of the growth of emotion is the liberation from the personal element. Personal emotion fools, is partial, unjust. Greater knowledge is in proportion to fewer personal elements. The problem is to feel impersonally. Not all emotions are easily freed of the personal. Certain ones by their nature corrupt, separate. Others, like love, lead man from the material to the miraculous.” (From “The Meaning of Life,” a.k.a. Pure and Impure Emotions, page 3) 

The distinction between that which corrupts and separates as opposed to that which re-unites is clear enough here.

From a certain vulgar perspective, we do end up with an “evil” here; yet the evil lies, as Gurdjieff goes on to explain, not in the inherent nature of external things, but in the agency that engages with them. Everything turns on that agency and the choices that it makes; and we find ourselves here in a distinctly Swedenborgian territory. That same territory is by no means foreign to Gurdjieff, who bases all the great premises of his teaching on personal responsibility and the fulfillment of being-duty. Indeed, we find those concepts embedded even here in this rather pithy examination of good and evil, both as they exist subjectively and objectively.

One might sum this up with an aphorism: A selfish wish to return to the good is evil.

 May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Good and Evil in Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, Part I: Overview

 Part I of a seven-part series

In reviewing Gurdjieff’s comments on good and evil, a significant part of his opinion on this matter is exposed in chapter 44 of Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson.

The chapter is another inner allegory couched in Gurdjieff’s standard vehicle: a metaphysical treasure hunt. The uncovering of lost, ancient knowledge results in a revelation. In this case, the lost knowledge of the teachings of Makary Kronbernkzion, inscribed on two elephant tusks, preserved since the time of Atlantis. They became separated and their significance was forgotten. 

One of these tusks was eventually buried and had to be dug up (an abstract reference to Gurdjieff’s adage “bury bone deeper,” indicating to us that we need to dig to understand the meaning of this chapter.) The device is simple enough: he has concealed the old folk saying, “you have to put two and two together” in his description of the elephant tusks. That is to say, what he’s trying to impart in this chapter ought to be obvious to anyone who thinks about it a bit. 

The passages are encrypted and embedded in a series of stories about family relationships and genealogy, echoing Gurdjieff’s emphasis on the need for an awareness of membership in clan (a typical feature of traditional societies) and the respect for one’s heritage. The passages about the various angelic beings eager to pass judgment on whoever it was who corrupted humanity, along with the discovery — to their horror — that it was not only one of their own, but one of their best — is a recapitulation of the overall theme of the book, that is, the fallibility of even the highest being-bodies. 

It’s also a cautionary tale about the rush to judgment; because Makary Kronbernkzion is, we’re told, not ultimately to blame for the misinterpretation of his discoveries. This is a micro-encapsulation of the guiding principle behind Gurdjieff’s discourse on good and evil: “a being-world-view with diverse aspects.” 

In attempting to blame Makary Kronbernkzion for the objectively pathetic state of man’s awareness and his obsession with good and evil, the angelic host inadvertently engages in the exact same behavior they’re condemning. We find, in other words a fable embedded in the very action of the angels themselves. They’re forced, in the end, to seek a reversal from God himself for the consequences of their previous decisions, which were in error. This is an indicative of the need for ”help from the higher.” The fact that they can’t undo their previous judgment, but only ask for amelioration, is a cautionary tale reminding us that no matter what else, we remain responsible for our actions. That the amelioration of punishment is granted is a reminder that there is always hope. 

There is, furthermore, a powerful and explicit irony in the situation: as Gurdjieff remarks of “our ALL-MOST-GRACIOUS-CREATOR, he “only thought a little and then consented to command that this deserving soul should continue to exist on the holy planet until the future results of his evil deed should be revealed.” This neatly puts the whole question of good and evil back into play on a much higher level. From this one remark alone, we can presume that Gurdjieff is not telling us that good and evil don’t exist ( one of the vulgar interpretations of the text) but, rather, that they aren’t what we think they are. As with the entire allegory of purgatory, the ideas of good and evil turn around the question of personal responsibility.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Notes for the Aspiring Homeowner

 

The question often comes up of payment; and how I pay for anything inside myself.

We pay with suffering. But the suffering can’t simply be suffering that comes from outside. Remorse of conscience only comes from my inner digestion of the nature of my life and my action, my being.

You think that you are going through life shopping for sweets. Get a little of this, get a little of that. It’s very nice. Some decent food. An attractive man or woman. That car you wanted. Or, in the sense of the inner life, a compliment, something that pats the ego on its head. We all stagger from one event to the next hoping for these little treats.

Perversely, my irritations and the things I suffer with outwardly become treats as well. I indulge myself with my negativity. That’s also a little bonbon for me to eat. I catch myself nurturing my negativity, sucking on it like a hard candy and encouraging it so that I can nurse resentments and carry them around with me, go back to them to savor how wrong the other person was. And so on.

In this way, I have some suffering; that’s for sure. But I'm spending it on one petty little thing after another, without thought, automatically. So even in the matter of my negativity, I’m shopping for sweets.

But we're actually trying to buy a whole house. This is a serious business. If we want to change from within, we can’t go shopping for sweets anymore. We have to save. We're going to need a down payment and mortgage. If I squander all of my suffering on petty negativities from within, I never concentrate enough of it to make a down payment on anything. This is why I need to catch myself in the middle of my negativity.

When we discuss non-expression of negativity, it means almost nothing from an outer point of view. Sure, I can't yell at that person. Easy enough to understand. But so what? Inside, everything that created the yelling is still there. 

I need to confront that — I need to understand how not to express my negativity inwardly, how to save it up, to more consciously understand that it's there and resist it from within. Not to ignore it or suppress it, but to fully engage with it inwardly and concentrate its energy so that I can really suffer what I am. See what I am inside. There's a lot of filth here that I have been treating like it’s bonbons. I need to stop sucking on that and look it straight in the face. 

I need to be ruthless with my assumptions. Save up to put the down payment on the mortgage. 

And it’s deeper still; it turns out I can’t afford to buy a house. I need help. I’m never going to be able to borrow what I need if my credit isn’t good; my own efforts have to demonstrate that.

Then maybe help will come.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Purgatory, Gurdjieff, and Meister Eckhart: Part 3

Illustrations are from the Tympanum of Conques Cathedral in Conques, France.

An esoteric abstract on the details of the Tympaum is available for free, on request from the author.

And when a great many of these perfected independent Sacred Individuals had been assembled on the Most Most Holy Sun Absolute, then between the emanations of these Sacred Individuals and the atmosphere of the Most Most Holy Sun Absolute there was established what is called a 'geneotriamazikamnian contact, ' which brought on this terrible misfortune for the 'perfected highest being-parts' of which I have just told you.  

Geneotriamazikamnian contact means, roughly translated, “contact brought about by individual entities joined together in action by the law of three.” You can see why he coined a special term for it. 

"To be sure, the action of the results of this 'geneotriamazikamnian contact' soon became harmonized with the already existing action of our Most Most Holy Sun Absolute, and, from then on, the emanations of the sacred Theomertmalogos had to be changed, and the first consequences of this disastrous contact brought about a change in the harmonious movement of many solar systems and produced a disharmony in the inner functioning of certain of their planets.  

The collapse of the functions of individual impressions in the formation of being and the introduction of subjectivity into the wholeness of being began to disrupt the proper functioning of centers in mankind. This is what Gurdjieff means when he says that the disastrous contact brought about a change in the harmonious movement of many solar systems. Our inner cosmos is in disarray as a result of the admixture of these multiple subjectivities, each one of which formed according to law, but has a subjectivity at its heart that presumes its own authority.

Lest we begin to doubt that Gurdjieff is speaking in this allegory about the creation of our inner cosmology, about anything other than that — any literal understanding — he specifically mentions the following event:

"It was just then that there broke away from the solar system Khlartoomano that famous planet with quite exceptional particularities, which exists alone in space, at the present time this planet is called 'Remorse of Conscience.’

There cannot be any doubt that Gurdjieff refers here, as he does in other places, to the event whereby conscience became buried in man’s subconsciousness, which protected it from the admixtures in the psyche which damaged mankind’s ability to follow God’s commandments. This is why the planet “Remorse of Conscience” exists alone in space. 

It is, perhaps, a sobering thought that per Gurdjieff’s cosmology, in order to be at all, we must eventually go there. 

It does not have its own sun to give it light: it is, like Beelzebub himself, in exile.

Of final note — and I will not say much about it here — we should note that according to Gurdjieff, the collapse of the inner functions of man’s psyche into egoism was a terrifying event — that is, it inspires great fear. While the word is tossed off almost as a dramatic aside in the text, I believe it is worthy of much deeper contemplation, since fear forms so much of what we are. 

Inevitably, that fear must arise because of the competing force of the various individual kernels of ego within us, each one of which — as Meister Eckhart probably would have told us, were he here — wants to preserve its own existence at all costs, even if it needs to do inner violence in order to do so.

While the functional relationships that ME expounds in his explanation of the mechanics of interaction between God, the soul, and the outer world are the subject of Gurdjieff’s breakdown — and certainly more could be said about this — it’s notable that ME, while he mentions suffering in the key sermons that discuss the subject, does not bring us to the question and the role of feeling and remorse in the same way that Gurdjieff does. This is notable to me because remorse is the most important and inevitable of functions engendered by the awakening of sensation; and of course it is next to impossible to understand any of Gurdjieff’s practice without understanding the role of sensation, which is entirely absent from ME’s teachings. Eckhart thus stands closer to Zen in his description of an intellectual path of abandonment, which might be more like into the way of the yogi than that of the fakir or (ironically) the monk. 

As such, the chief benefit of an examination of ME’s functional description of the action of God’s word (Gurdjieff’s Theomertmalogos), the soul, and the outer world here is in the way it corresponds to Gurdjieff’s description of man’s inner cosmos and its dysfunction. 

In Gurdjieff’s view, the soul is broken: and perhaps this is why he says man as he is “doesn’t have one.” ME does not propose the lack of a soul per se; but he certainly joins Gurdjieff in a view of it as in absentia as regards to proper function. 

Is there really a difference?

While it is highly doubtful, in my opinion, that Gurdjieff derived his observations in any direct way from ME’s comments on the subject, it reveals an underlying esoteric tradition of great power which must be very ancient, and has informed successive views of the derangement of man’s psyche relative to the higher. 

We touch here on ancient Babylonian myths of the Tower of Babel, medieval discussions of the function of the soul as intermediary, and a modern Master’s ingenious spiritual allegory couched in the form of a new cosmology. All of them are related; and every one of them calls us to an intimate examination of the nature of our outer life, its contact with the soul, and the consequences for all of our parts.

 May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.