Customer Reviews

Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson: An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life Man - All & Everything/First Series

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This is one of the best works of spirituality ever written. Gurdjieff admits in his forward ("The Arousing of Thought"'s Warning to the reader) that he tried conveying his "wiseacring" in a straightforward, "newsworthy" manner but found that it failed miserably. So, being enamored his entire life by both the form and content of the "1001 Nights", he tried another approach. The genius of his writing is that it not only imparts information to you the reader, but performs or enacts the "cosmic principles" he's discussing in the very way the sentences are constructed (which many people find extremely difficult, overloaded, and dense). But his book was intentionally composed in a rhythmic & musical fashion. The sentences have distinct cadences (many of them have multiple embedded clauses) which when read aloud, as Gurdjieff recommends, are apt to put one in a strange state of mind. It takes a while to acclimatize oneself to the rhythm, but once one does it becomes easier to intuit--with something other than the "intellectual center"--the ideas behind the words. His neologisms are also meant to dislocate, but they are simply combinations of Russian, Armenian, and newlyminted words.

About the content: Gurdjieff's system is often lumped in with many other fads and gurus' elixirs under the moniker "new age". Which is ironic, considering that these ways of being are apparently thousands of years old. But what feel-good new age movement starts with the axiom that human beings are basically in varying degrees of a hypnotic state, possessing only a shred of what Western philosophies call free will? (and that shred only "awakens" sometimes in "peak experiences" when the three centers work together--mortal danger, sexual union, etc., when the ego drops away). Yet this axiom is not asked to be taken on "faith" by Gurdjieff. His is a hard-headed empiricism--indeed, he thought most of humanity incapable of "faith". He never claimed sagehood nor superhuman powers of himself, and was quite satisfied to turn people away and even shock them with behavior at odds with the European conception of a guru. One can only really grasp Gurdjieff's starting point--"Man is asleep"-- by either already being convinced of this truth, or by doing experiments in conscious attention to convince one such.

Gurdjieff's "Beelzebub Tales to His Grandson" is not your everyday type book. Its intentions are not to entertain, but to shock the reader into conscious awareness of the many mechanisms that control his/her own life. Ions after his fall from heaven we find Beelzebub completely transformed through experience into the wisest of beings. In a interplanetary mission to keep our galaxy in order, Beelzebub makes use of a delay to teach his grandson about many things of importance, and especially about those strange beings on the planet earth. The funny thing is that the reader becomes the grandson, and it is Gurdjieff whom teaches us about the reality of our unconscious "living". It is a book not intended to be an easy read, the book demands us to make great conscious efforts to understand the content and to keep alert. However, any effort put into the book is petty in comparison to the gain. "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson" gives us a choice to remain the automatons we are, or to take a step into realizing our potential as conscious beings. It is one of the most important books...ever.

But the taste for this text is, in my opinion, very worth acquiring. The comparisons that come most readily are to Moby-Dick, The Faerie Queene, and to Blake at his best. But I've read this book three times in less than two years; the others only once. This book, my friend, can be addictive.

Obviously, not everyone feels compelled to read difficult books again and again. If you don't feel up to reading 1,238 pages of legitimate weirdness (in a good sense) repeatedly, with full attention, then this book is probably not for you.

However, I wholeheartedly recommend this book for the patient, the openminded, and the good-humored. You won't regret the effort. I agree with the reviewer below: Once you've finished this, you'll understand what it is you've taken in.

It should also be noted that Gurdjieff's sense of humor is more subtle than one might think. He repeatedly toys with the expectations of his reader in ideosyncratic ways that might be easily missed without a heads-up.

Cheers!

When Gurdjieff discovered that his institute would fall short of accomplishing his aims and his condition after a severe automobile accident forced - or bookmarked - a re-evaluaton of what he must do, he turned to writng and produced this "Magnum Opus." He remarked that it was a javalin hurled into the future. I have read the book 3 times, and portions repeatedly, and contrary to the remarks of certain reviewers, I and others giving favorable reviews are not gullible. It took me three decades to see this issue in its true light, and the more I understand, the more I see I have a long way to go. The book is a legominism, to use Gurdjieff's own technical term defined in the text. It exists on several levels, and on occassion I have been able to verify that for myself by the perceptivity of its deeper currents. Actually I will be the first to confess that you cannot tell much about this book by the reviews. The reviews - pro and con - tell much more about their authors than they do about this book. That should be expected. Even my own review reminds me of Beelzebub's description of our species as those unfortunate three-brained beings that breed and multiply upon the face of that ill-fated planet Earth. Gurdjieff held up a mirror, and reviewers - including myself - seem eager to show our faces in it. Without question this is the most important work ever written on the issue of stopping wars, and that singular observation alone among many other comparable ones is sufficient to validate Leary's comment that this is the most important work produced in the twentieth century. But because of its inaccessibility to many audiences, I would also include Ouspensky's account of Gurdjieff's teaching, "In Search of the Miraculous," on a par with it. Ouspensky's book may actually be more important immediately, but ultimately Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales will emerge to its true stature among segments of our posterity. Gurdjieff knew and stated that there was no hope for current generations. Without this javalin hurled into the future, there would be no hope at all.

The first page of the first chapter is enough to chase off the faint-minded; the series of dependent clauses alone could serve to tutor government and insurance attorneys on the use of detailed language. For those who are willing to take the Friendly Advice which appears a few pages prior, however, and persist, this "weighty tome" will reward them richly. No simple review can cover this work. It has stayed with me for 23 years with no diminution in its power to inspire hope, and cut -mercilessly- through cherished nonsense. When one considers that it is a tale of Universal and Terrestrial events told by a Significant Participant, it becomes easier to understand the long-time hold this book can have on even the widely-read. This book takes up a lot of space. What you take away from working your way through this masterpiece naturally depends on your experience and your ability to let it speak in the author's language. It's difficulty is more like that of listening to someone with a heavy accent; eventually, you can get used to it. You can laugh out loud, and you can gain insights, and you can come away with a certain humility. Some may feel as if they acquired a new friend; others may end up looking like a hunted man. Maybe it depends on how well one remembers. I've been through it twice. So far, Life has not invalidated it. I've never once seen it for sale as a used book.

The purpose of Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson is stated by the author at the very beginning of his book: "To destroy, merciless, without any compromise whatsoever, in the mentation and feelings of the reader, the beliefs and views, by centuries rooted in him, about everything existing in the world."

There is no question that the author, from his very first word, strives merciless in order to fulfill the purpose of his book.

The Tales are the "Unofficial Story of All and Everything," of God, Creation, the Universe, Earth and Man. Unofficial because it is not the account given to us by official history and the official philosophies, sciences and the arts; and official religion as well. It is the hidden story, the one rejected by the ancient Greek fishermen turned philosophers-scientists.

The story is told by Beelzebub, a three-brained being from a planet close to the Center or Most Most Holy Sun Absolute, the chief Place of Residence of our ENDELESS CREATOR. Long time before the story actually begins, this Beelzebub is forced, because of a transgression of his youth, to live in exile in a remote corner of the Universe, our solar system. Instead of complaining and dwelling in self-pity, Beelzebub spends his thousands of years, (time in the story being relative to the place of birth of the observer), of exile learning about All and Everything, including the reason for his exile. Because of his meritorious work and indirect service to our UNI-BEING OMNI-BEING COMMON FATHER ENDELESS CREATOR, he is eventually pardoned and allowed to return home. He is now recognized in the whole Universe as a distinguished Sacred Individual and He is invited to a special conference in the solar system whose sun is the "Pole Star." While flying through space in route to the conference in the "transspace" ship Karnak, Beelzebub tells his twelve years old grandson Hassein about All and Everything he has learned during his years of exile. Of special interest to Hassein are those strange three-brained beings breeding on the planet Earth, where Beelzebub spends great part of his exile. With time and attention, we the reader become Hassein.

Everything we have heard of is elevated or brought in the story to unexpected levels.

Entropy, we are told, is Time, the Merciless Heropass, the "Ideally-Unique-Subjective-Phenomenon." It is precisely because of Time's Subjective-Merciless action that the CREATOR has to create the present universe. In this way Entropy is vanquished, in such a way that even Maxwell's clever demons could not have remotely figured it out. The secret, we are told, is very simple: "the Trogoautoegocratic principle of existence of everything existing in the Universe by means of reciprocal feeding and maintaining each other's existence." This principle of existence our COMMON FATHER ALL-GRACIOUS LORD SOVEREING ENDLESS ENDLESSNESS CREATOR actualizes by altering the functioning of the two primordial sacred laws, making them the two fundamental laws of World-creation and World-maintenance: the Sacred-Heptaparaparshinokn and the Sacred-Triamazikamno.

Hell is elevated to a state of voluntary suffering. Suffering itself to a cosmic necessity arising from the operation of the Laws. Good and Evil are impersonal forces operating in conformity to World Laws. Man's fall is caused by the "unforseeingness of Most High Sacred Individuals." Chiefly among them are the Great Archangel Sakaki and the Chief-Common-Universal-Arch-Chemist-Physicist Angel Looisos. They are responsible for the implantation in Man's ancestors of an organ with very astonishing properties, among which that of making them to perceive reality topsy-turvy: Kundabuffer. Although Kundabuffer is later removed, the consequences of its maleficent properties are still with us.

The story at times gets very provocative.

We are told about "that completely formed Arch-Vainglorious Greek, the future Hasnamuss, Alexander of Macedonia." We learn that the Divine Teacher Sacred Individual Jesus Christ is resurrected not in His physical but in His Kesdjan body. Judas is not a traitor but the "most faithful and devoted" of all the disciples of Jesus Christ. Darwin, in the words of the very wise Mullah Nasser Eddin, "is very successful, though not without luck, in finding the authentic godmother of the incomparable Scheherazade on an old dunghill." Mesmer is a humble and honest learned being who, had he not been pecked to death by his contemporaries, might have saved Man from the consequences of Kundabuffer. Mendelejeff "a contemporary comical earned chemist." Atlantis a place of the highest learning. A university "is just that `hearth' on which everything acquired during decades and centuries by preceding beings is burned..." America is, during the present flow of Heropass, "the fundamental source of the issuing of new causes of abnormality." Among Americans is the largest percentage of beings with "possibilities for the acquisition of Being nearer to the normal Being of three-brained beings in general." And much more we are told.

Man himself is elevated to a Being with the possibility of attaining Objective or Divine Reason and thus becoming a conscious laborer of our ALOVING ALMIGHTY COMMON FATHER ENDLESS ENDLESSNESS ETERNAL CREATOR ALL-MAINTAINER, a cell in GOD's Brain.

But Man, we are told with great sadness and great sorrow, is now asleep to his innermost essence, to the Divine Impulse of Objective Conscience, the REPRESENTATIVE OF THE CREATOR in Man. He takes the ephemeral for the Real. He can no longer Love with the "Love of Consciousness," Believe with the "Faith of Consciousness," and Hope with the "Hope of Consciousness." This is "The Terror of The Situation." Consequently, Man can no longer fulfill his highest destiny. The chief particularity of his strange psyche is to periodically engage in the process of reciprocal destruction or war.

Everything is elevated or brought to unexpected levels in the story. Sometimes with great humor; all the time with great humanness. Even the concept of everything itself is elevated, becoming the "common-cosmic Ansanbaluiazar: Everything issuing from everything and again entering into everything."

After having read the book three times, following the author's indications given in his Friendly Advice, one wonders: Have we been doped by the "official story of all and everything?"

This is Gurdjieff's magnum opus, his greatest and most potent work, but also his most difficult. This is not a book for those merely "curious" about Gurdjieff or for the casual reader (for those, I'd recommend "Meetings with Remarkable Men" or the works of Ouspensky as better introductions to Gurdjieff's teaching.)

This is one of the most difficult books I've ever read (and I have a Master's degree in English) but, having read it three times now, judge it to be one of the most rewarding for the effort one puts into it. Gurdjieff dictated this book aloud to a secretary and often had parts of it read aloud in group meetings; if he found a concept too easily grasped, he'd re-write that passage to make it more difficult. It compares to nothing else, though if you can imagine a combination of Swedenborg's "Heaven and Hell," Blavatsky's "Secret Doctrine," the "Thousand and One Nights" (Arabian Nights), Nietzsche's "Thus Sprach Zarathustra," and "Don Quixote" you might have a little idea of the scope of this book.

Part of the difficulty of the book is simply Gurdjieff's deliberately archaic prose style, with long sentences that sometimes run for half a page and which require the reader to go back to the beginning of the sentence to find a single verb or noun referent that belongs to the concluding word at the end. If you're familiar with prose written prior to the 18th century, such as the works of Shakespeare, you'll have an easier time of it. Gurdjieff also makes up dozens of words, but usually their meaning is pretty clear from the context. (The final chapter, "From the Author," abandons most of these neologisms and is the easiest part of the book to read.)

Gurdjieff's ideas themselves, when put into plain English, are simple, logical (in their context) and powerful. In a nutshell: Humans go through their lives like sleepwalkers or automatons, hypnotized by society and heredity; it is difficult but possible to "wake up" out of this hypnosis, though very few can do it; to start the journey requires brutal honesty, sincerity, and constant self-observation. When one observes oneself, one will see one's self-hypnosis; one will see also that one's idea of oneself is false and egotistic, that one really has no "will" but is only a collection of mechanical reactions and whims, and that only by developing a real center of gravity, real consciousness, and conscience can one hope to escape the universal fate of decay and death, and acquire the possibility of aiding cosmic evolution or, as Gurdjieff poetically phrases it, "lighten the sorrow" of the Absolute. To accomplish the highest potential of a human -- "objective Reason" -- requires "conscious labor and intentional sufferings." Getting through this book is a good first step!

People have mentioned that this is a humorous book - it is not...at least not in the way you would think. It is, perhaps, one of the most serious books ever written, with the humorous happenings put in as a disctraction. What IS humorous is the reviews of those who did not like this book. Gurdjieff (G) would probably chastise me for warning you, but this book was intended to scare off most readers. Similar to the warnings and gliphs carved into ancient tombs and pyramids to ward off potential thieves, G covers his message within a layer of "confusing" and "disjointed" stories. This is due to the old adage - NOTHING WORTH ANYTHING IS EVER EASY.

However, for those willing to put in the time and effort (which is usually measured in years, not months or weeks), this book holds some of the gems of our universe. But if you are unwilling to expend the effort, it is probably not worth it. Better to read Uspenski's "Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution" which is straight forward and naked.

In either case, remeber: Believe nothing - verify everthing.

Gurdjieff reveals candidly in the opening pages of Beelzebub's Tales that this First Series of his writings is for the real consciousness buried within us and is intended to "destroy without mercy" the conceptions and views that have become so firmly rooted because of centuries of people living abnormally. He shows us with compelling exactness our place in the universe, our responsibility as human beings and why, despite the best efforts of sacred messengers sent to us from above, we remain tragically separated from what is most essential to the aim of human existence.

While helping us to see the harsh truth about ourselves, Gurdjieff does not leave us in the lurch. He leads us back out of the darkness and, as a kind grandfather, guides us patiently toward the light, at every step carefully watering seeds of consciousness that lie buried deeply inside us. On the long journey toward discovering Beelzebub's most subtle lessons, we are helped to feel our smallness and our partiality and to see that if we wish for real understanding, the mind alone, no matter how adroit, will never be enough.

Gurdjieff warned us in his introduction not to expect the kind of literature to which we are generally accustomed. As we try our best to penetrate to the core of Beelzebub's Tales, it turns out that we, instead, are being penetrated. The Great Beelzebub, telling stories to his grandson, leads us to rediscover in the depths of ourselves, God's quiet representative.

Anyone who approaches Beelzebub's Tales with an attitude of openness is likely to receive substantial help, though the exact manner in which one is worked on by this remarkable influence may remain something of a mystery. Familiarity with the Gurdjieff work is not necessarily a prerequisite to receiving the book's special gifts. If there is a preparation that may allow one to hear better, perhaps it is only the deep wish to be oneself, the wish to live as a normal human being.

I began my Fourth Way studies about thirty years ago, and read several dozen works by all of the principle Gurdjieff disciples and worked in an intense Fourth Way school for about seven years. I have great respect for the system Gurdjieff presented, if not for every person and organization that claims to teach it. Nevertheless, I differ with those who insist this is a fabulous treasure trove of spiritual wisdom.
Gurdjieff was known for, among other things, his cynical view of human nature, and his continual lampooning of humanity's self-delusion. Ironically, the adulation with which some regard this book is as good an illustration as any of Gurdjieff's view that people -- particularly "seekers" -- are extremely gullible, and also that they will try to console themselves for having made a mistake by convincing others to make the same mistake. Beelzebub's Tales is very poorly written by someone who may well have been a great teacher, but had limited talent for writing. Any practical wisdom it presents is buried in hundreds of pages of tedious verbiage. Some will insist that if you haven't discovered that Gurdjieff wrote the entire work "consciously," and that "every sentence was intentional," and that it was all "encoded esoterica," well, you just don't understand, since you're asleep. This is self-delusion. We may indeed be asleep (I'm certainly convinced of it), but that doesn't make Beelzebub's Tales a masterpiece, or even a worthwhile read. There is little in the book that is worth the tremendous effort of unearthing it. Like the Third Series, which, before it was widely available, was naively assumed to contain The Answer (largely because Gurdieff himself hyped it in his previous writings), Beelzebub's Tales discloses nothing that cannot be found more clearly articulated in many other more recent expositions of various spiritual traditions. It is the very inaccessibility of anything of value that seems to cause some to continue to applaud the book and others to plunge into it zealously, assuming that the more apparently worthless it is, the more worthwhile it must be. It's the Emperor's New Clothes. After you read Beelzebub's Tales, you may parade around (if only in your own mind) that you have read one of the great "esoteric" classics, from which you have gleaned some very profound knowledge. If you glean the realization that your time may be much better spent than plowing through fat, badly-written books looking for encoded knowledge, perhaps the time will have been well spent. None of this is meant to imply that studying the Gurdjieff work lacks value, but reading books, even by Gurdjieff, isn't what the work is all about. It's just easier. I'd suggest reading In Search of the Miraculous and maybe a couple of others of the basic canon, and if it grabs you, join a group of sincere folks who are trying to apply the concepts. If you find yourself instead spending many hours poring through Beelzebub's Tales you may be trying to avoid the real work, rather than pursuing it.