GURDJIEFF: THE FOUNDER OF AMERICAN MYSTICISM
By Roya Monajem, Tehran

Payvand News
11/06/07

What follows is the note I added to my translation of Gurdjieff’s
canon Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, subtitled The Objective
Criticism of the Life of Man after, a few days of internal fierce
struggle whether I should take this venture, this risk or not. With
the encouragement of the publisher, I did. My intention in writing
this note was to share with readers what helped me when reading this
amazing ‘story book of ontology and cosmology.’ I will be grateful
if people familiar with G’s teachings and this book in particular,
and those interested in Mysticism, and New Age Spiritualism in general
to criticize this note as it is the only alternative that I can think
of to make sure I haven’t gone too wild here!

This is what I wrote there.

Apparently, after sending this work to the publisher (1949), Gurdjieff
tells his entourage that his task is now finished and leaves this
world a week later. Based on the fact that it was translated and sent
to the publisher while he was still alive, one could hope that there
would be only one translation; what a vain wishful thinking!

After finishing the first draft of the translation which was carried
out from the photocopy of the book I had borrowed from Saman Sadjadi
(Penguine 1992), I received a normal copy of 1998 edition. Having
the above wishful thought in mind, I put this on a shelf and
continued checking and working with that photocopy, until one day
when wishing to check some part, I picked up this new book which
was closer at hand. What a shock! No, it can’t be true, this is a
different translation! I turned to the first page and found exactly
what was said in the first book: "Original written in Russian and
Armenian. Translations into other languages have been made under the
personal direction of the author…" with no other note mentioning
that this is a new revised edition. Very strange and unexpected from
well-established western publishing system! What is the story?

I started to compare them. As much as I could see they both convey the
same things, but they are different! Now the question was: Which one
of them is the translation carried out "under the personal direction
of the author?"

Yet, we can ask that if they essentially convey the same thing why is
it important to know which is the ‘genuine or authentic’ copy? Another
question may answer this question. Is a painting produced by a
master painter the same as even its best reproduction carried out
by his most talented and well trained pupil? Our eyes might not see
the difference, but something in us feels and senses it because they
come from two different sources of ‘energy and emanations.’ In other
words, they come from two different persons at two different levels
of Being. In our case, Gurdjieff’s energy should still be present in
one and absent in the other…

To find an answer I contacted two different Gurdjieff’s groups in
US through e-mail and it was interesting to find out that both were
as much surprised as I was when I first realized this fact. And they
both suggested that I should take the latest edition as the authentic
copy. Opposite to what I was feeling.

Anyhow at the peak of "what to do?" in this regard, I reached the
section dealing with Islam and while struggling with one of the
typically long Gurdjieffian sentences, I appealed to the new edition
to see how it is translated there. Seeing the term Mohammadi instead
of Moslem and associating what Edward Saeed says about the history of
this term in his Orientalism, I became certain that this can not be
the genuine authentic translation because it almost seems impossible
that Gurdjieff who took a considerable part of his teachings from
Islamic mystics and Islamic mystical orders says Mohammadi instead of
Moslem. Thank goodness, the first question finally found a satisfactory
answer at least for me and from then on I peacefully continued taking
the first copy as the genuine authentic translation and mentioned the
discrepancies only when they were noticeable as footnotes. After all,
what has happened in this regard is nothing new. G gives us ample
information about what has happened during the past human history
each time that a prophet, a theoretician, a philosopher, a mystic,
a man of genius…. puts his head on earth.

There were other important points that had to be pondered upon, and
with the above incidence I no longer had the motivation or inclination
to appeal to G’s groups in the west.

The next important ‘what to do?’ showed itself from the first page of
the first chapter if we don’t take the author’s introduction as the
first chapter. What Persian equivalent should I use for the frequently
repeated term "common presence?"

Common can not mean ordinary here because the term ‘ordinary presence’
is also used every now and then with a different meaning. I used the
Persian word moshtarek which is the meaning it conveys in the English
sentence ‘we have common points of view’ for example, all the time
thinking whether it is a proper equivalent or not. Why has G used
this term, what does he exactly mean by that? …

The first simple answer that comes to mind is that he means the
presence that is common in all humans. If so then why didn’t he
use only presence? Why does he use the same term for even a single
human being?…

Until one day, (imitating Archimedes): "Eureka!" huzur moshtarek’
must be O.K, for this simple reason that based on a very old belief,
G regards every single human being as a legion and proves it in an
understandable way. We don’t have a single ‘I", the common presence
is the presence of all this legion of ‘I’s.

>From G’s point of view every human being has at least three ‘I’s
that he calls physical, emotional and mental; and the perfect man
has three bodies, a planetary body, an astral body and a mental body
and taking into consideration the universality of the law of seven,
each of these bodies should consist of seven layers… little by
little we are reaching that legion.

Therefore, perhaps we can say that ‘common presence’ replaces the
‘I’ that humans if real should have, but lack as they are.

The other important ‘what to do?’ concerned G’s forged words, in
most cases, long almost unutterable words encountered almost in
every page or so. Some of these words or to be more exact, parts
of them consists of words understandable for any educated English
speaking person. Should these parts be translated? But from another
perspective this words may be looked at as an international language
that if translated will lose this quality. For example, the word
hepta-paraparshinokh means the law of seven which has its own term in
different languages, but when G’s word is used, it is not important
what is our mother tongue, we will know exactly what is meant by that.

So although translation of these meaningful parts could help
Persian readers a little in remembering them better, like saying haft
(seven)-paraparshinokh, but again there was a sense or a feeling that
together with responses of the people I consulted in this regard was
telling me that this should not be done and I just should mention these
cases in the corresponding footnotes as much my knowledge allows me.

But what could be G’s intention in making these words? He does give
some scattered candid and obscure reasons for it that you will read
as you read through the text, but for those who are not familiar with
G’s teachings, although deeply disinclined to transfer my personal
understanding and insights – you will read the reasons later – it is
perhaps useful to mention one of them.

G believes that humans as such are just a special and unique brand of
mechanical transformers of substances and radiations spending their
live in ‘sleep.’ According to some statistics an average human being
can live at most only for one minute with total and complete presence
and awareness, and I like to add here that even this seemingly very
short time span is a lot and rarely happens. And according to some
other statistics we can keep our attention on the text we read for
only 20 minutes and even this only concerns those texts that really
need attention. Therefore, the first function of these unfamiliar
words for everybody regardless of their mother tongue is to prevent
us from losing attention and ‘go back to sleep’ or our usual state of
‘daydreaming,’ and in case this has already happened they compel us to
‘wake up’ and resume attentive reading.

We can say more about their probable other functions, but let us each
think and discover them for ourselves. There is a long discussion in
Ouspensky’s In Search of Miraculous[1] about why it can be harmful
to transfer our personal understanding at the level that this poor
translator may have which frankly and honestly doesn’t know where it
is and makes her doubt whether she should have ventured to translate
this work or not in the first place. What gave her some assurance is
based on the text itself.

G says that he has written this book by ‘active mentation.’ Allow me
to transfer the meaning of this term by telling you a story.

Another important G’s pupil (disciple), Orage, who was an experienced
knowledgeable Englishman, the editor of a literary magazine called
New Age and the first organizer of G’s groups in US (although
apparently without G’s permission and knowledge at first)[2] and
perhaps the first editor of English translation of this work, when
asked why he didn’t do much edition, he answered he ‘didn’t find
it necessary; it is understandable as it is!’ (free quotation).[3]
In the peak of reflection and self-doubt about the above question,
that is the relation between understanding and the level of Being,
reading or hearing this about Orage was an assurance. This was more
or less exactly what I felt when I first faced this work. Despite
long sentences, sometimes covering more than half a page, it was
startling to see that with a little bit of concentration and effort,
they can be translated without the need to cut sentences and…

So although Orage’s comment decreased that self-doubt, another question
appeared almost immediately that helped me to understand the term
"active mentation" better as well. The question was how is it that
two people, one Persian speaking and the other English speaking,
in two different time-spaces, particularly with such great different
cultural backgrounds have reached almost the same perception in regard
to this work, that is it is understandable.[4] So perhaps this is
the difference between ‘objective and subjective art’ mentioned in
Miraculous: in objective art, the result of active mentation the
artist knows exactly what sort of effects he/she wishes to create
on the audience regardless of their individual subjectivity. For
example, we all feel overwhelmed when we first face Persepolis,
due to its grandeur and…, and then each depending on the degree of
our understanding (which according to G is the mean of knowledge and
level of Being) is affected in other ways as well. In subjective art,
however, the work is mostly created by accident and thus can have
totally different effects on the audience.

The more I lived with the content of these Tales, the more I could
feel the truth in the fact that G knew exactly what he wanted to do
with his readers.

The second point that should be mentioned in this regard is that
G has written his canon in the form of story. Why? Perhaps because
to make it easier for us, regardless of our race, culture, social
class, level of education and…to understand his teachings. A great
part of this work is indeed written in the form of story, and tells
the story of human life, the world, the cosmos. And stories talk
to our ‘commonest presence.’ Everybody regardless of his/her race,
social cultural geographical, educational level, understands such
stories. In addition, if we pay a little bit of attention to the
sound of stories when they are told, we can detect the same melody
or different performances of the same melody depending on the language.

Once upon time…Il etait une fois…. ruzi, ruzegaari…Grandparents,
regardless of their time-space of their origin relate stories in the
most loving way to their grandchildren, particularly when they are
their favorite grandson, their heir! This familiar ‘romantic’ melody
can also play a significant role in facilitating the understanding
of this piece of objective art. And after all, translation of such
stories is no difficult job.

But what can be said about other parts of this work that sound
like when one is trying to solve a difficult mathematical question
and therefore has to press hard one’s brain? Here, G uses the same
language that is the contemporary international scientific language
that everybody with a high school diploma should be familiar with it.

Mathematical problems, chemical formulae, biological and physical laws
and principles say the same thing, no matter in what language they
are said or written. Translation of these texts is not very difficult
either, but how much we can understand them is anther thing. It is
here that the reciprocal relation between knowledge and level of Being
comes to play a role and as Molana says ‘everybody becomes my company,
according to his/her thoughts.'[5]

And the last point in this regard.

I sincerely hope I have not made any mistakes that would harm the
reader’s understanding in this translation with this confession that
imitating G, I have intentionally used a couple of words that may sound
awkward, and for which we have commoner equivalents, such as the word
‘intentional’ (repeated often) translated as niyat-mandaaneh. The
purpose was to further help reader to stay attentive and awake while
reading. But in order to complete this note, let me add the following.

G says: "Man is a legion with three headquarters mentioned above.

If I am right to say that stories of this work which are simple stories
of our everyday life experienced by all human beings regardless of
time-space, aim at our physical center (roughly instinctive brain)
and the non-story parts aim at our mental center, then although on
one hand the love stories of this work are limited to first of all
Beelzebub’s love for his grandson, a case of mother-son love and
a couple of friendly love-relations, and on the other hand very
little has been directly said about our emotional center, then one
can rightly ask how is he tackling our emotional center that plays
a vital role in understanding?

Its absence does not appear very strange at the first glance or
first reading of the book. According to Ouspensky in Miraculous,
G’s teaching has been criticized for not saying much about love and
loving! He is indeed a strange mystic! Yet, let us not forget that
again according to Ouspensky, G called his way the Way of Sly-man and
in the documentary that Peter Brook has produced on G’s life we see
a scene when G catches a sparrow, paints it and sells it as American
Canary to buy some old books from a Persian speaking book seller
and there is a part in this very work that associate the same thing,
but of course he is the kind of sly man that Hafez describes: Learn
slyness and be generous, as it is not an art/an animal not drinking
and not becoming man.

It is hard to believe that G has left out this center particularly
vital in reaching real understanding of anything, let alone his
teachings. He must have tackled this mysterious center of ours, but
so slyly that we can not perceive it at first. But how? This was a
question that haunted me all the time, until the sixth time I was
working on this translation,[6] when something like an answer crossed
the mind. Perhaps he is tapping our ’emotional center’ by using
’emotional’ words?! The word love itself is used a dozen of times,
but always with two other words ‘faith’ and ‘hope’ and a few times
with the third word ‘conscience.’ He says with the abnormal life man
has created for himself with the result of development of self-love,
vanity, conceit and…he has pushed these sacred feelings to his
subconscious and what man calls ‘love’ is mainly sexual attraction
and/or mental considerations (free quotation). He says, it is a long
time that man has not experienced the real taste of love and that is
why he can not describe this "most beatific sacred impulse." The clue
he gives for its identification is this: ‘the result of experiencing
of which we can blissfully rest from the meritorious labors actualized
by us for the purpose of self-perfection.'[7]

The first notion that we can have from this is that love is the fruit
of ‘conscious labor’ for keeping oneself ‘awake,’ for the purpose of
self-perfection. On the other hand he says in another part: what is
most accessible to us in the process of self-perfection is patient
endurance of unpleasant manifestations of the people we live and
socialize with for any reasons’ (free quotation).

Isn’t this in a way teaching how to truly love in practice, or using
the prevalent term used today, isn’t this the very definition of
‘unconditional love?’

G’s teachings seems lacking this most loved subject, love, because
his approach is neither the ‘Hollywoodian’ contemporary form of love,
nor the classic form of ‘Leyly and Majnoon’ or ‘Romeo and Juliet’
including mystical type of love. In fact, considering all evidences
(see below) we can dare to call this way, the ‘way of lovers of truth’
with its loving aspect concealed because of the above reasons.

And if it repels potential candidates of the way of spiritualism
for this, let them cling to empty words and as there is not much
open talk about love and loving, let them follow much talked about
‘unconditional love’ of American mysticism and the ‘new priesthood
of spiritualism’ arising from it. Yet, the interesting point or the
paradox here is that G himself with all the people he directly or
indirectly trained in West, among them are many brilliant trend-making
individuals in various fields from sciences to arts may very well be
called the founder of this new priesthood and American Mysticism.[8]
This may not seem obvious at first because not all the people who
‘profiting by the crumbs fallen from his so to say ‘idea table’ and
‘opening their, what he would say ‘Shachermacher workshop-booths’
were honest and sincere enough to mention his name and his influence
on their works. But the real proof for the above claim, the G is the
founder of a ‘new’ kind of ‘priesthood’ is not only this very book
itself, but a part of it where Beelzebub tells his grandson that
‘one of the strangest things about these contemporary three-brained
beings is to teach what themselves don’t know…

You can even earn money from it (free quotation).[9] Has there ever in
the history of mankind been so many ‘gurus’ and ‘spiritual teachers’
all charging their ‘followers?’ Like lots of other things, G bravely
just brought into surface what the traditional priesthoods have been
doing in concealment in the past and present.

G or perhaps his Eastern masters before him realized that the center
of civilization is moving completely to the West and by G’s first
appearance in Russia, even from Europe to America and this ‘new
civilization’ needs its own spiritual way and language. Africa at the
time of Atlantis, Asia at the time of Persia, Egypt, Babel, India and
China, Europe since Renaissance until the end of WWII and now it is
naturally the turn of America to be the center of civilization.

Majnoon’s turn is over and it’s our turn/everybody has his turn for
five days (Hafez)

Now when we look at the question from this perspective, and we realize
what is now ‘exported’ under the name of ‘progressive culture, new age
material and spiritualism’, is directly or indirectly influenced by
G’s teaching, himself trained in central Asia, then we might be less
worried and fearful about our ‘backwardness’ from the contemporary
center of civilization and as G says ‘vainly grow sincerely indignant
about it.’ G says nothing that Hafez, Molana and their teachers and
disciples haven’t said. As he himself says all our ‘the- so-called-
new- ideas and inventions have a prototype in the past.’ G is just
repeating all the things considered as ‘truth’ from the dawn of
civilization on earth in our language. Without a true knowledge
of where we are standing we can never appreciate what we have and
therefore continue being ‘vainly and sincerely indignant’ and worried
for being ‘backward’ without deeply reflecting on the meaning of this
word, plus the fact that it is impossible to violate the universal
laws and do not pay for our past and present mistakes? Dark nights
always end in bright days, and east, west, north, south will have
their turn of rise and fall, birth and death…

And in the last analysis what has been said up to now about the
"Original Truth" no matter who, where and when is based on a war
between two opposites, good and bad. G’s emphasis on the existence of
the third reconciling force, recorded before in the idea of Trinity and
Tao, particularly in the way he explains it, in a language accessible
to all is really promising.

We were talking about G’s method of tackling our emotional center by
using emotional words. If this understanding based on G’s teaching of
the way our centers work and the role of ‘association’ in these centers
is correct and Beelzebub’s Tales simultaneously affects and works on
all our three centers – with stories affecting our instinctive center,
non-story parts tackling our mental center and emotional words tapping
our emotional center – then this last example will give another proof
for calling ‘Fourth Way’ or the Way of Sly-man, the Way of lovers of
Truth. G says the main human calamity arises from the fact that they
divided themselves into four casts (classes) that turns all human
relations to that of lords-slaves, depending on whether we see the
other person as higher or lower than ourselves. In other words, if we
see them higher, we behave like slaves, immediately "picking up our
handkerchief to rub their ‘ticklish organ’" (i.e. flatter them) and if
we see them lower we boast like lords and issue orders, etc. Another
thing that G says in addition to what mentioned above about division
of followers of any ‘ontological cosmological system of thought’
into different orders as soon as its founder put his head on earth,
is that never would come a day when only one system of thought rules
the earth.[10] In fact, these are among G’s ‘objective criticisms of
the life of man.’

What I don’t understand in this historical masculine interpretation of
life and creation based on war of opposites and division into classes
is why we never suspect the fact that perhaps this state of affairs is
also the will of our common ‘Endless Creator?’ In other words, there
will never come a day when only one single interpretation of Truth
dominates the world, because human beings are of different types and
thus different world views, different approaches to the Truth. Doesn’t
this variety and multiplicity rule throughout the universe, from the
world of plants and animals, to the world of planets and solar systems?

Let’s look at this evidence in more detail. In case of mammals and
even before them, this variety starts with having two different sexes
for each species and in case of human beings, this two different sexes
if looked at from Indian point of view, each has three different types
(vata, pita, kafa) and if we look at them from Persian-Greek point of
view they are divided into four dispositions (lets leave out details)
and if we look at them from Chinese point of view they are divided
into five dispositions, and if we look at them from the Gurdjieffian
level of Being, these earthly ‘three-brained beings’ are divided into
seven groups depending on the kind of emanations they issue with seven
planets and seven amshaspand (archangels) representing them and based
on I Ching’s eight hexagrams, they are divided into 8 groups and based
on Eneagram types, into 9 types, and if we wish to see what is allotted
to each of these two, three, four, five, seven, eight, nine types in
‘the circle of fate,’ depending on the time of their conception or
birth, they are divided into at least 12 different types, each having
their own world-view and their own interpretation of existence. And
perhaps the cause of ‘war between 72 nations’ lies in this simple
fact that because humans do not have the same predisposition, type,
emanation, for this simple reason that they are born and grow up on
different geographical lands with different nutrition under different
cosmic radiation, willy-nilly they are divided into different races,
tribes, nations, casts, classes, types. Perhaps there is a purpose in
that too. It is true that it is the recognition of this obvious fact
that probably gave rise to the idea of Federation (from the time of
ancient Persian king Cyrus) and recently of Democracy, but the question
is why hasn’t this unquestionable fact become an integral part of
our collective consciousness, why hasn’t it entered our genetic pool?

The reason may lie in the overwhelming dominance of our ontological
and cosmological interpretation based on the war of opposites that
by now has completely dominated two of our centers- instinctive and
mental. Perhaps that is why as G says, the world has always been as
it is today.

Somewhere in these Tales dealing with the aim of creation of humans,
an idea is expressed that is very similar to Zoroastrian view that
Ahuramazda (God) created humans to help Him in the war with Ahriman
(Satan), with this difference that here the aim is to help Him in
management of his expanding Universe. It has also been said that
the world is an ‘experimental crucible,’ and ‘attainment of full
consciousness is only possible through conscious work on ourselves,’
therefore is it not possible to conclude that the ‘owner of this
laboratory’ wish to try different combinations for his ultimate aim,
even if we forget the terminating question of the above paragraph
(i.e. keep with masculine interpretation)? What I am trying to say
is let us work hard to truly accept the fact that because we are
of different types, we can never live in peace with ourselves and
others, unless we recognize this fact so deeply that it gets absorbed
in our genetic pool and becomes an integral part of our collective
consciousness.

On the other hand, each one of us is a legion, perhaps in order to
make it easier for us to understand each other, to understand the
concept of ‘unity in multiplicity’ or in Sadi’s words to understand
the fact that ‘sons of Adam are organs of the same body’ and "because
they did not see the Truth, went after Myth" (Hafez) In other words,
we actually and potentially carry all personalities in this legion for
a purpose: to reach a better understanding of ourselves because one
can only understand things that one experiences within oneself. In
other words, in this way one may accelerate the process of sensing,
feeling and thinking of unity in multiplicity and vice versa. The
aim of the concept of reincarnation and life after Resurrection
and Day of Judgment may also be the same. Whether they are true or
not, they point to the same thing: ‘one will pay for one’s deeds’
(karma). The idea of ‘humans as being a legion’ can be helpful in
this regard because in order to decrease ‘evil deeds’ in ourselves,
learned men suggest: "Know yourself." In G’s teaching the first step
begins with self-observation in this manner: we become the camera
woman or man of ourselves, as much as we remember. It is not that
difficult because I don’t think there is now not a single person in
our world who has not wished to be a film star and has not identified
herself/himself with one of them! And when one identifies oneself
with any personality, one learns to play that role. Ignoring the
more important fact that most of the time, whether by ‘free will,’
‘free choice’ or coercion, we are acting. In any case, supposing we
honestly and sincerely wish to ‘know ourselves,’ by playing the role
of the camera man or woman of the film of our lives, we gradually
see that a series of ‘I’s appearing nearly everyday, seizing the
reign of the ‘common presence of our legion.’ For example, we might
notice that everyday a nervous person appears and depending on the
surrounding condition, shows itself once or twice a day and is then
replaced with for example, a lazy ‘I’ or a worried ‘I’ or…and…

This film-making helps us to experience more fully the reactions and
moods of these different ‘I’s, and if the real ‘I’ that would hopefully
be born little by little from the Nothingness of the pettiness of
our existence succeeds in taking their reigns in its hand, then when
this happens, we add say one ‘carat’ to that diamond or Persian
turquoise that we carry on our brace and is called ‘essence.’ In
other words, we reach peace with the same number of ‘I’s and ‘unify’
with them and experience some heavenly moments until the next ’round’
the next cycle starts. And if we fail to take their reign, we keep
reproducing the same film-script over and over and pay the price in
the form of reactions we receive from outside and thus ‘the melody of
grief continues'[11] till the last day of our lives. For those who
think and believe that is the end, well that is the end. For those
who believe in the first above concept (reincarnation), we continue
to pay the price in a series of lives by in this very same world,
and in the other concept we pay it in another world. As it can be
seen the difference between these two seemingly different concepts
is just a difference in time-space.

Now on the basis of all that has been said, if we accept that it is
according to Nature or Divine providence to have different types of
human beings, then the subsequent divisions have to automatically
follow; the fall of Mazdakism in Ancient Persia, Socialism and
Communism in modern Europe present further evidence for this claim,
that is human divisions into different categories. The main question
is how is it that despite this concept of war of good and bad now
encoded in two of our brains (instinctive and mental), thanks to all
religions and moralities so far appearing and existing on earth,
with the obvious result that every ‘other human being’ depending
on the degree of differences – from racial to tribal, to religious,
cultural, familial and… – will deep down can appear ‘evil’ to each
of us, how is it that we don’t explode out of anger or tear ‘others’
into pieces, for the simple fact that these ‘others’ can not share our
‘world view,’ ‘our perceptions’ our ‘conceptions’ and…?

There is only one answer! It is even possible to hear all of us singing
it in our hearts: It is the heavenly feeling of Love, located in the
third center that is preventing this most natural consequence of our
historical way of thinking.

Now if the above claim sounds sensible that G taps this center by
using emotional words – isn’t this what poetry does to us?

– then based on above explanations, when this center is tapped,
three other impulses are simultaneously tickled too, conscience,
faith and hope.

In addition to the above and some other emotional words seen in this
work, there is one word that is repeated at least once in nearly
every page or so of these Tales: favorite, mahboob.

Human beings are Beelzebub’s grandson’s favorites! It is a word that
in most of our mystical poetical writings is one of the commonest
equivalents of man’s ultimate ‘beloved,’ god.

When we see this word which is now a part of our collective memory,
knowingly or unknowingly it brings about associations that in addition
to tackling our emotional center, it tickles the emotional part of our
physical center as well. On the other hand, considering the root of
the word emotion, (stirring up, incite, agitate), any emotional word
then should put into motion something in our mental center too. In
other words, it should refer us to an emotional experience as the
result of which an emotional state arises in us whether we become
aware of it or not! All in all, each time we read this or similar
words, all our three centers are stimulated, but each time with new
impressions that arise from information and knowledge obtained from
the part we are reading. Now remembering that the place of conscience
is in the same center, when this center is tapped, our conscience
is tickled too. Then according to G’s description of conscience:
"a state in which a man feels all at once everything that in general
feels or can feel,"[12] then many of our habitual self-deceptions,
self-righteousness, self-justifications, partialities, and…will
naturally and automatically gradually fall into pieces. And this
opens the way for further purification of this important center for
our conscious individual development and evolution. It is apparently
through this center that we get connected to our higher centers.

It is here that we can understand better the meaning of the story
G relates in the first chapter of this book as a warning, the story
of a villager who buys a whole kilo of red pepper, thinking that it
should be a tasty fruit, and starts eating them, ignoring the burning
he is experiencing in his whole being. And again according to him,
god forbid if one reads this book just as a matter of curiosity! Like
that poor villager, one of the ‘I’s of this legion writing these lines
who ignored G’s warning was badly burning and scorching all the time.

As this may happen to others too, then with a relatively long
experience in medical field, I have a suggestion that may salve and
ease this burning and scorching.

The sense and feeling of our ‘weaknesses’, ‘selfishness’,
‘self-deceptions’, ‘wishful thinking’ ‘day-dreaming’, ‘foolish
prejudices and partialities’, ‘vain self-justification’ and… is
indeed hellish!

When we start acting as a camera man or woman of our personal life,
that is start the process of self-observation, it is necessary to
try to remember one thing that can be called the second step in
G’s teaching: we should remember not to identify with any of ‘I’s we
film. For example, when we observe a lazy ‘I’, we should remember that
our whole ‘common presence’ is not lazy, but we just have a strong
or weak lazy I, shared by all humans. That’s why laziness (sloth)
is a sin in Christianity. Secondly, it helps to search for instances
in life that we were not lazy at all, like in childhood when we were
always ready to play and never felt lazy in this regard. Or even now,
when we wish to do something with our whole being, like taking a trip
to a land we always wished to visit, or…In such instances the lazy
I immediately disappears. We do the same thing with all our ‘weak,’
‘negative’ or ‘evil’ ‘I’s, that is we search for their opposites,
that is our ‘positive’ activities, the ‘sacrifices’ we make and…

Not identifying ourselves with any ‘I’s whether positive or negative,
means to remember our real self. Each time we say this is not I,
willy-nilly we remember that divine particle we carry in our ‘heart’
that will be revealed only after we manage to see the veils of our
vain empty egoism.

You are your own veil Hafez / Rise up (and free yourself from them
all)[13]

We separate ourselves from each I of the legion, to get closer to
our real I. Such long way! G comes to help again. He says: "study of
laws of the world of creation and existence (which is what this book
is all about) frees the third force that is the reconciling force.

This is perhaps the ‘peace and reconciliation’ we feel when reading
sacred books or mystical poetry. We might not feel it as openly when
reading Beelzebub, because G intentionally sends our ‘I’s into the
battlefield and in this war of "Iran and Turan"[14] like any other war
‘they don’t distribute halva (sweet).’ And the main reason for this
may be that according to G this third or reconciling force always
arises from friction and opposition of the other two sources, called
active or affirming and passive or denying forces. So when this war
reaches its peak, manifested each time we watch a part of the film we
are making of our lives and realize our ‘nothingness’ ‘powerlessness’
‘will-less-ness’ and the bitter truth that ‘we can do’ almost nothing
with our own initiative, or put it another way, we are always under
the domination of outside influences, and because this time we truly
wish to ‘know ourselves’ and thus close the normal habitual doors of
escapes, we naturally can feel even suicidal, it really helps if we
remind ourselves of the presence of the above reconciling force that
arises from the war between the two legions of our ‘good’ and ‘bad’
‘I’s (inner good and evil) and this is a law and it can’t be otherwise
as much as the sun -at least under normal conditions – can not rise
from the west, and wish beforehand that whenever this reconciling force
arises, something in us uses it to back up and strengthen the legion
of those ‘I’s that wish to stay on the path of goodness and love. And
we can be sure that our ‘common presence’ knows what this something is,
because as mentioned above, G promises that fortunately the impulse of
‘conscience’ together with the other three impulses, i.e.

faith, hope and love have not been completely destroyed and uprooted
in us. One of the qualities of the force of goodness is to evoke love
and forgiveness in us and what is more healing than this? Can there
be a more beautiful heaven than what we find inside ourselves when
filled with love?

[1] Ouspensky was one of G’s most famous pupils and apparently
G’s groups in US suggest that anybody interested to learn about G’s
teachings should start with this book. The Persian translation of this
book by the translator has been published by Elmi Publishing (2007).

[2] See G’s Life is Real, only then when "I am."

[3] I know it is very unscholarly, but I really don’t remember whether
I have read this or heard it in a documentary film about G’s life.

[4] It should be mentioned here that the sense and feeling I get from
G’s style of writing reminds me very much of our Persian writers of
the past, before the invention of grammar here. Some of them still
live. They use same long sentences without commas, full stops or
question marks. It is quite possible that the translation of this
work into English had been much harder than into Persian. G’s style
can be due to his origin, being born in Caucasus and getting a part
of his teachings from Persian speaking people of the region.

[5] Not a poetical translation! The verse is har kasi az zan khod
shod yaar man.

[6] G suggests that we should read this book three times, and because I
translated the work, typed it, edited it and corrected it as well, I am
counting the times I went over it as all these different personalities!

[7] See B’s Tales…chapter 26, Terror of the Situation.

[8] See Jacob Needleman and George Baker, Gurdjieff, Continuum, 1996.

This book is a collection of articles written by significant American
and European figures influenced by G’s teaching.

[9] There is a discussion with Ouspensky in this regard in the same
mentioned book. In addition, Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, may be looked
at another evidence for this claim.

[10] The source of exact or free quotations in this note is
Beelzebub… unless stated.

[11] Sohrab Sepehri.

[12] In search of Miraculous, chapter 8.

[13] A verse impossible to translate, I had to add that interpretation
to show the point.

[14] In our now called legendary history recorded mainly in Ferdosi’s
epic, Shahnameh, this is a never ending war, that symbolizes the war
of good and bad.