(First printed on 26 August 1933 by La Société Anonyme des...)
First printed on 26 August 1933 by La Société Anonyme des Editions de l'Ouest, this is the 75th anniversary edition, a reprint of the first edition. This edition has been digitally retypeset and is not a facsimile.
(BEELZEBUB'S TALES TO HIS GRANDSON is Gurdjieff's world-fa...)
BEELZEBUB'S TALES TO HIS GRANDSON is Gurdjieff's world-famous cosmological epic. It examines human life on Earth from the viewpoint of beings belonging to a distant world, led by the 'all-wise Beelzebub'. Through this cosmological allegory - rich in humour, anecdote and linguistic elaboration - Gurdjieff demonstrates a methodology for the spiritual growth of all mankind.
(The Armenian-Greek spiritual teacher, G.I. Gurdjieff’s au...)
The Armenian-Greek spiritual teacher, G.I. Gurdjieff’s autobiographical account of his youth and early travels has become something of a legend since it was first published in 1963. A compulsive read in the tradition of adventure narratives, but suffused with Gurdjieff’s unique perspective on life, it is organized around portraits of remarkable men and women who aided Gurdjieff’s search for hidden knowledge or accompanied him on his journeys in remote parts of the Near East and Central Asia.A classic work, suffused with a haunting sense of what it means to live fully – with conscience, with purpose and with heart.
(This is one of the few records published by Gurdjieff in ...)
This is one of the few records published by Gurdjieff in which he offers guidance to his 'community of seekers', the pupils from many countries who joined him in Paris and New York.The first section is mainly autobiographical, relating material crucial to an understanding of the nature and intensity of personal effort required for an all-inclusive work on oneself. This is followed by a series of talks which Gurdjieff gave to his pupils in New York in 1930, and then by a long, but incomplete, essay on 'The Outer and Inner World of Man'.
(From the back cover: "My ballet is not a mystery. The pur...)
From the back cover: "My ballet is not a mystery. The purpose of it is to present an interesting and beautiful spectacle. Of course, under the visible forms a certain sense is hidden, but I did not aim at demonstrating or emphasizing it. The chief position in this ballet is occupied by certain dances. I will explain this to you briefly. Imagine that in studying the laws of movement of the celestial bodies, let us say the planets of the solar system, you have constructed a special mechanism for the representation and recording of these laws. In this mechanism every planet is represented by a sphere of appropriate size and is placed at a strictly determined distance from the central sphere, which stands for the sun. You set the mechanism in motion, and all the spheres begin to turn and move in definite paths, reproducing in a lifelike way the laws which govern their movements. This mechanism reminds you of your knowledge."In the same way, in the rhythm of certain dances, in the precise movements and combinations of the dancers, certain laws are vividly recalled. Such dances are called sacred. During my journeys in the East, I often saw dances of this kind executed during the performance of sacred rites in some of the ancient temples. These ceremonies are inaccessible, and unknown to Europeans. Some of these dances are reproduced in The Struggle of the Magicians. Further, I may tell you that at the basis of The Struggle of the Magicians lie three thoughts; but, as I have no hope that they will be understood by the public if I present the ballet alone, I call it simply a spectacle." --Gurdjieff's Early Talks
The name George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff is surrounded with fantastic legend. In truth, his life was that of a man devoted completely to the search for forgotten knowledge and then to the arduous task of bringing it to life for our times. Gurdjieff was a prominent esotericist of his time, among his followers were writers P.L. Travers and Katherine Mansfield.
Background
Ethnicity:
George Ivanovich Gurdjieff was born to a Greek father and an Armenian mother.
G.I. Gurdjieff was born circa 1866 in Alexandropol (present-day Armenia), near the Persian border. His father was descended from Ionian Greeks of Caesarea. A herdsman on a grand scale, Gurdjieff’s father had inherited, through oral tradition, an ancient culture. Because of him, Gurdjieff’s childhood was steeped in the stories and poems of a distant past.
Later, singled out by the Archbishop of Kars Cathedral, he was guided by men who were capable of awakening in him the taste for essential values and who provided for him a modern scientific education as well as a profound religious training.
In this area of the southern Caucasus, where so many peoples were mingled—Russians, Greeks, Iranians, Tartars, Armenians—and where so many civilizations and customs confronted one another, a multitude of facts convinced Gurdjieff that a real knowledge of man and his nature had existed in the past and that its traces had been erased, but that it must still be possible to find it once again.
This conviction was to determine his entire existence.
Education
Gurdjieff's mother was Armenian and his father was Greek. Though his father worked as a carpenter, he also regaled Gurdjieff and others with recitations of legends, such as the epic of Gilgamesh. These tales may have spurred Gurdjieff's later belief in the existence of ancient knowledge that surpassed what was offered by science and religion.
Gurdjieff received early tutelage from the dean of the military cathedral at Kars, who was a priest and family friend. According to his autobiography, Meetings with Remarkable Men, he journeyed across Central Asia, Egypt and India in a voyage of spiritual discovery. However, there is no corroboration for Gurdjieff's self-reported accounting of his travels between 1887 and 1911.
When his travels were over, Gurdjieff returned to Russia. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, he moved to Tiflis, Georgia, where he opened the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in 1919. A few years later, Gurdjieff settled in France, where his institute took shape once more.
From his base at the Château du Prieuré, near Fontainebleau, Gurdjieff shared his new philosophy. He believed that man was in an almost constant sleep state, and that people must work to revive themselves in order to regain the higher consciousness that they are capable of. He also averred that the sleep state made people easy to manipulate, and was therefore a proponent of questioning everything.
At Fontainebleau, Gurdjieff often required people to listen to his writings as they were read aloud. People at the center also performed exercises and dance movements, sometimes to music created by Gurdjieff and composer Thomas de Hartmann.
Though he had brought followers with him to France, Gurdjieff gained more once he was ensconced in Fontainebleau, particularly as one early acolyte, P.D. Ouspensky, elucidated and propagated his teachings. His prominent followers included architect Frank Lloyd Wright's third wife, Olgivanna Hinzenburg, writer Katherine Mansfield, editor A.R. Orage and Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers.
Gurdjieff developed a special vocabulary of his own in some of his writings, using words such as "blastegoklornian." For his disciples, these words increased his aura of deep understanding and mystery. For Gurdjieff's detractors, they made his writings even more nonsensical.
Gurdjieff continued teaching even after his Fontainebleau center closed its doors in 1933. He remained in Paris during World War II, surviving under the German occupation. On October 29, 1949, in Neuilly, France (near Paris), he died at the approximate age of 83. He left behind works that include All and Everything (containing Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, Meetings with Remarkable Men and Life Is Real Only Then, When 'I Am') and The Herald of Coming Good.
Achievements
Throughout his life, Gurdjieff worked on the three parts of his magnum opus, ‘All and Everything’. The first part, ‘Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson’, is an extensive, figurative work, published posthumously in 1950. This work includes two English translations, one which was carried out under his observation and the other which was published in 1991. This is largely considered one of his greatest works because it is believed to give the best summary to Gurdjieff’s ideas, since part of the book’s intent is to arrogate the standard patterns of thought. Two of the other parts of ‘All and Everything’ titled ‘Meetings with Remarkable Men’ and ‘Life is Real Only Then, When ‘I Am’, were also equally successful, while the latter remained unfinished.
(Thirty-two meetings with Gurdjieff held at 6 rue des Colo...)
Religion
"RELIGION IS DOING; a man does not merely think his religion or feel it, he lives his religion as much as he is able, otherwise it is not religion but fantasy or philosophy. Whether he likes it or not he shows his attitude towards religion by his actions and he can show his attitude only by his actions. Therefore if his actions are opposed to those which are demanded by a given religion he cannot assert that he belongs to that religion."
IN SEARCH OF THE MIRACULOUS, p. 299
"All religions speak about death during this life on earth. Death must come before rebirth. But what must die? False confidence in one’s own knowledge, self-love and egoism. Our egoism must be broken. We must realize that we are very complicated machines, and so this process of breaking is bound to be a long and difficult task. Before real growth becomes possible, our personality must die."
VIEWS FROM THE REAL WORLD, p. 86
Views
Gurdjieff’s fundamental aim was to help human beings awaken to the meaning of our existence and to the efforts we must make to realize that meaning in the midst of the life we have been given. As with every messenger of the spirit, Gurdjieff’s fundamental intention was ultimately for the sake of others, never only for himself. But when we first encounter the figure of Gurdjieff, this central aspect of his life is often missed. Faced with the depth of his ideas and the inner demands he placed upon himself and upon those who were drawn to him, and becoming aware of the uniquely effective forms of inner work he created, we may initially be struck mainly by the vastness of his knowledge and the strength of his being. But sooner or later what may begin to touch us is the unique quality of selflessness in his actions, the sacrifices he made both for those who came to him, and for all of humanity. We begin to understand that his life was a work of love; and at the same time that word, “love,” begins to take on entirely new dimensions of meaning, inconceivable in the state of what Gurdjieff called waking sleep.
Quotations:
"THERE DO EXIST ENQUIRING MINDS, which long for the truth of the heart, seek it, strive to solve the problems set by life, try to penetrate to the essence of things and phenomena and to penetrate into themselves. If a man reasons and thinks soundly, no matter which path he follows in solving these problems, he must inevitably arrive back at himself, and begin with the solution of the problem of what he is himself and what his place is in the world around him. For without this knowledge, he will have no focal point in his search. Socrates’ words, “Know thyself” remain for all those who seek true knowledge and being."
VIEWS FROM THE REAL WORLD, p. 43 [pb]
"LIBERATION LEADS TO LIBERATION. These are the first words of truth—not truth in quotation marks but truth in the real meaning of the word; truth which is not merely theoretical, not simply a word, but truth that can be realized in practice. The meaning behind these words may be explained as follows:
By liberation is meant the liberation which is the aim of all schools, all religions, at all times.
This liberation can indeed be very great. All men desire it and strive after it. But it cannot be attained without the first liberation, a lesser liberation. The great liberation is liberation from influences outside us. The lesser liberation is liberation from influences within us."
VIEWS FROM THE REAL WORLD, p. 266
"ONE MUST LEARN TO PRAY, JUST AS ONE MUST LEARN EVERYTHING ELSE. Whoever knows how to pray and is able to concentrate in the proper way, his prayer can give results. But it must be understood that there are different prayers and that their results are different. This is known even from ordinary divine service. But when we speak of prayer or of the results of prayer we always imply only one kind of prayer—petition, or we think that petition can be united with all other kinds of prayers.… Most prayers have nothing in common with petitions. I speak of ancient prayers; many of them are much older than Christianity. These prayers are, so to speak, recapitulations; by repeating them aloud or to himself a man endeavors to experience what is in them, their whole content, with his mind and his feeling."
IN SEARCH OF THE MIRACULOUS, p. 300
"THE COMMANDMENT INCULCATED IN ME IN MY CHILDHOOD, enjoining that “the highest aim and sense of human life is the striving to attain the welfare of one’s neighbor,” and that this is possible exclusively only by the conscious renunciation of one’s own."
BEELZEBUB’S TALES, p. 1186
"ALL THE BEINGS OF THIS PLANET THEN BEGAN TO WORK in order to have in their consciousness this Divine function of genuine conscience, and for this purpose, as everywhere in the Universe, they transubstantiated in themselves what are called the ‘being-obligolnian-strivings’ which consist of the following five, namely:
The first striving: to have in their ordinary being-existence everything satisfying and really necessary for their planetary body.
The second striving: to have a constant and unflagging instinctive need for self-perfection in the sense of being.
The third: the conscious striving to know ever more and more concerning the laws of World-creation and World-maintenance.
The fourth: the striving from the beginning of their existence to pay for their arising and their individuality as quickly as possible, in order afterwards to be free to lighten as much as possible the Sorrow of our Common Father.
And the fifth: the striving always to assist the most rapid perfecting of other beings, both those similar to oneself and those of other forms, up to the degree of the sacred ‘Martfotai’ that is up to the degree of self-individuality."
BEELZEBUB’S TALES, pp. 385–386
"IT IS VERY DIFFICULT TO EXPLAIN WHAT TAKES PLACE IN ME when I see or hear anything majestic which allows no doubt that it proceeds from the actualization of Our Maker Creator. Each time, my tears flow of themselves. I weep, that is to say, it weeps in me, not from grief, no, but as if from tenderness. I became so, gradually, after meeting Father Giovanni.…
After that meeting my whole inner and outer world became for me quite different. In the definite views which had become rooted in me in the course of my whole life, there took place, as it were by itself, a revaluation of all values.
Before that meeting, I was a man wholly engrossed in my own personal interests and pleasures, and also in the interests and pleasures of my children. I was always occupied with thoughts of how best to satisfy my needs and the needs of my children.
Formerly, it may be said, my whole being was possessed by egoism. All my manifestations and experiencings flowed from my vanity. The meeting with Father Giovanni killed all this, and from then on there gradually arose in me that “something” which has brought the whole of me to the unshakable conviction that, apart from the vanities of life, there exists a “something else” which must be the aim and ideal of every more or less thinking man, and that it is only this something else which may make a man really happy and give him real values, instead of the illusory “goods” with which in ordinary life he is always and in everything full."
Professor Skridlov, MEETINGS WITH REMARKABLE MEN, pp. 245–246
"YES, PROFESSOR, KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING ARE QUITE DIFFERENT. Only understanding can lead to being, whereas knowledge is but a passing presence in it. New knowledge displaces the old and the result is, as it were, a pouring from the empty into the void.
One must strive to understand; this alone can lead to our Lord God.
And in order to be able to understand the phenomena of nature, according and not according to law, proceeding around us, one must first of all consciously perceive and assimilate a mass of information concerning objective truth and the real events which took place on earth in the past; and secondly, one must bear in oneself all the results of all kinds of voluntary and involuntary experiencings."
MEETINGS WITH REMARKABLE MEN, p. 242
"FAITH CAN NOT BE GIVEN TO MAN. Faith arises in a man and increases in its action in him not as the result of automatic learning, that is, not from any automatic ascertainment of height, breadth, thickness, form and weight, or from the perception of anything by sight, hearing, touch, smell or taste, but from understanding.
Understanding is the essence obtained from information intentionally learned and from all kinds of experiences personally experienced."
MEETINGS WITH REMARKABLE MEN, p. 240
"THE SOLE MEANS NOW FOR THE SAVING OF THE BEINGS OF THE PLANET EARTH would be to implant again into their presences a new organ, an organ like Kundabuffer, but this time of such properties that every one of those unfortunates during the process of existence should constantly sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of his own death as well as of the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rests.
Only such a sensation and such a cognizance can now destroy the egoism completely crystallized in them that has swallowed up the whole of their Essence and also that tendency to hate others which flows from it—the tendency, namely, which engenders all those mutual relationships existing there, which serve as the chief cause of all their abnormalities unbecoming to three-brained beings and maleficent for them themselves and for the whole of the Universe."
BEELZEBUB’S TALES, p. 1183
"WILL IS A SIGN OF A BEING OF A VERY HIGH ORDER OF EXISTENCE as compared with the being of an ordinary man. Only men who are in possession of such a being can do. All other men are merely automata, put into action by external forces like machines or clockwork toys, acting as much and as long as the wound-up spring within them acts, and not capable of adding anything to its force."
VIEWS FROM THE REAL WORLD, p. 71
"Faith of consciousness is freedom
Faith of feeling is weakness
Faith of body is stupidity.
Love of consciousness evokes the same in response
Love of feeling evokes the opposite
Love of body depends only on type and polarity.
Hope of consciousness is strength
Hope of feelings is slavery
Hope of body is disease."
BEELZEBUB’S TALES, p. 361
Personality
For a truer perspective on Gurdjieff we must turn to his circle of devoted followers, who paid for their insights by effort. These were men and women magnetised not by a system of self-supportive notional abstractions but by a human being of Rabelaisian stature; by the fine energies at his disposition; by his compassion; and by his ability to transmit a pratique. Their journals and autobiographies constitute a rich and singular literature: Gurdjieff is assigned his inescapable historicity, yet somehow struggles free, emerging with the cohesion and the presence of a myth.
No definitive biography of Gurdjieff exists or is remotely in prospect. He was born in Alexandropol c.1866, and first appears on a well-lit stage in 1912 in Moscow. To encounter him was always a test: the first meeting — certainly for those who became his disciples — was the axis on which a whole life turned; then in succeeding years, a human being with all his inherent frailty would answer, more or less truly, to Gurdjieff's insistent demand. There lay the drama. As for us, we can only live here and now; and yet to the degree that we enter into the pupils' experience by an inner act of compassion, their memoirs hold a value above the purely historical.
The composer Thomas de Hartmann (1886–1956) and his wife Olga were Gurdjieff's intimate disciples and companions for twelve years, and it is thanks to him that Gurdjieff's music has reached us. In Our Life with Mr. Gurdjieff they share with us the journey they shared with him: from Petrograd, seized by crisis in 1917, across the Caucasus mountains to Tiflis, finally reaching Paris in 1922. Simplicity sometimes approaching naïveté, characterises their writing, but the impression of Gurdjieff is only the more striking. We find him moving impartially, almost invisibly, through scenes of confusion and fratricidal turmoil; welcoming each difficulty and danger as a new opportunity for practical teaching.
In October 1922 Gurdjieff took the Prieuré at Fontainebleau-Avon, a chateau in the grounds of 200 acres; here he rapidly created conditions for self-study, unprecedented in Europe. Gurdjieff had a special rapport with his pupils' children, caring for their education in the word's real sense. Sometimes he challenged them; sometimes he lead them with great delicacy towards a vital insight; always his teaching had an element of surprise and the hallmark of practicality. From eleven to fifteen Fritz Peters (1913–1980) lived at the Prieuré, and in Boyhood with Gurdjieff his fresh and at times uproariously funny memoir, he relives that special experience.
In spring 1924, Gurdjieff visited the USA with prepared pupils, to give public demonstrations of his sacred dances; and their influence upon key intellectuals was far-reaching. The dances also spoke categorically to the young Englishman Stanley Nott (1887–1978) who had a different, simpler background: who had travelled the world working hard at many trades, and whose feelings had been enervated by his sufferings in the trenches. 'Here,' wrote Nott, 'is what I went to the ends of the earth to find.' His allegiance to Gurdjieff proved life-long and undivided; he spent many summers at the Prieuré, and in Teachings of Gurdjieff conveys both his inner and outer experience with Boswellian vigor. He incorporates in full the penetrating (though not definitive) commentary on Gurdjieff's book Beelzebub by his friend A. R. Orage.
The decade 1925 to 1935 Gurdjieff devoted to his writing, achieved in the distracting conditions of the Café de Paix. Here, in spring 1932, he was encountered by the American authoress Kathryn Hulme (1900–1981) later to attain fame with her novel The Nun's Story; she hungered to become his personal pupil, but nearly four years passed before her persistence was rewarded. Her autobiography Undiscovered Country richly evokes her experience in a special group of four women (all sophisticated, avant-garde and single — and some frankly Lesbian) which met daily in Gurdjieff's flat in Rue Labie. At its worst the style is cloying: at its best vibrant. Gurdjieff's humanity and capacity to work with diverse types is strongly conveyed, as is the group's emotional commitment to each other and their teacher. They named their small company 'The Rope' in order never to forget their interdependence in ascent.
Urged to flee Paris before the Germans entered in 1940, Gurdjieff chose to remain in his modest flat at 6 Rue des Colonels-Rénard. Though well into his seventies, he was unsparing of his energies: giving individual counselling; teaching a new series of dances or Movements at the Salle Pleyel; and somehow maintaining in those sparse times the patriarchal hospitality of his audacious feasts. French interest in Gurdjieff — formerly slight — now burgeoned, drawing many intellectuals to him, among them René Zuber (1902–1979) the film director. His slim volume Who Are You Monsieur Gurdjieff? is a calm and fastidious meditation: confronted with the enigma of Gurdjieff and deeply concerned to situate him in relation to Christianity, Zuber is repeatedly brought back to question himself.
Fifteen months before Gurdjieff's death, J. G. Bennett (1897–1974) who had briefly met him in the 1920s, established a more serious — though necessarily intermittent — contact. Elizabeth Mayall (1918–1991) later to become Bennett's wife, was free to live in Paris from January 1949, and thus shared more fully in the unique world of Rue des Colonels-Rénard. Here at Gurdjieff's last suppers, his mysterious ritual the 'Toast of the Idiots' served as the vehicle of a final and intensely individual teaching. Idiots in Paris, the Bennetts' raw unedited diaries, captures with almost painful honesty and immediacy the last hundred days of Gurdjieff's life, and his pupils' poignant struggle for understanding. Gurdjieff died at Neuilly on 29 October 1949.
Physical Characteristics:
"[...] His appearance was striking enough even in Turkey, where one saw many unusual types. His head was shaven, immense black moustache, eyes which at one moment seemed very pale and at another almost black. Below average height, he gave nevertheless an impression of great physical strength"
John G. Bennett
Quotes from others about the person
(In reference to a second car accident Gurdjieff suffered in 1948)
"[I] was looking at a dying man. Even this is not enough to express it. It was a dead man, a corpse, that came out of the car; and yet it walked. I was shivering like someone who sees a ghost."
With iron-like tenacity Gurdjieff managed to gain his room, where he sat down and said: "Now all organs are destroyed. Must make new." Then he turned to Bennett, smiling: "Tonight you come dinner. I must make body work." As he spoke a great spasm of pain shook his body and blood gushed from an ear. Bennett thought: "He has a cerebral haemorrhage. He will kill himself if he continues to force his body to move." But then he reflected: "He has to do all this. If he allows his body to stop moving, he will die. He has power over his body."
Perry, Whitall: Gurdjieff in the Light of tradition, quoting J. G. Bennett.
"Gurdjieff was standing by his bed in a state of what seemed to me to be completely uncontrolled fury. He was raging at Orage, who stood impassively, and very pale, framed in one of the windows . . . Suddenly, in the space of an instant, Gurdjieff's voice stopped, his whole personality changed, he gave me a broad smile—looking incredibly peaceful and inwardly quiet— motioned me to leave, and then resumed his tirade with undiminished force. This happened so quickly that I do not believe that Mr. Orage even noticed the break in the rhythm."
Fritz Peters, Boyhood with Gurdjieff.
"It was there that I first met Gurdjieff in the autumn of 1920, and no surroundings could have been more appropriate. In Gurdjieff, East and West do not just meet. Their difference is annihilated in a world outlook which knows no distinctions of race or creed. This was my first, and has remained one of my strongest impressions. A Greek from the Caucasus, he spoke Turkish with an accent of unexpected purity, the accent that one associates with those born and bred in the narrow circle of the Imperial Court. His appearance was striking enough even in Turkey, where one saw many unusual types. His head was shaven, immense black moustache, eyes which at one moment seemed very pale and at another almost black. Below average height, he gave nevertheless an impression of great physical strength"
John G. Bennett
Connections
Although no evidence or documents have certified anyone as a child of Gurdjieff, it is believed that he had seven known children.
Daughter:
Cynthie Sophia "Dushka" Howarth
Her mother was dancer Jessmin Howarth. She went on to found the Gurdjieff Heritage Foundation.
Son:
Sergei Chaverdian
His mother was Lily Galumnian Chaverdian.
Son:
Andrei
Born to a mother known only as Georgii.
Daughter:
Eve Taylor
The mother was one of his followers, American socialite Edith Annesley Taylor.
Son:
Nikolai Stjernvall
His mother was Elizaveta Grigorievna, wife of Leonid Robertovich de Stjernvall.
Son:
Michel de Salzmann
His mother was Jeanne Allemand de Salzmann; he later became head of the Gurdjieff Foundation.
Daughter:
Svetlana Hinzenberg
Daughter of Olga (Olgivanna) Ivanovna Hinzenberg and a future stepdaughter of architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
