For anyone with the time, patience and endurance there are few pursuits more likely to change your view of the world and it’s history than a deep examination of the writings of George Gurdjieff, or Mr. G or just G.
Gurdjieff lived and taught through the first half of the 20th century. He died in Paris in 1949, having survived and taught there through WWII. He is best know, if at all, through his second work, Meetings with Remarkable Men, made into a movie by Peter Brook in 1979. That book is a kindof-autobiographical account of Mr. G.’s wanderings through Central Asia in search of teachers. A central character is G.’s father and earliest teacher. He also introduces the the Sarmoung Brotherhood as an authentic holder of ancient wisdom, from whom he presumably received some esoteric transmission (Legomanism).
His main opus All and Everything, Beelzbub’s Tales to His Grandson however, is something entirely different. Superficially an epic myth detailing the life and eventual pardon of the fallen angel Beelzebub, exiled to the solar system for ‘certain actions’ he mistakenly undertook as a ‘firey youth’. We join Beelzebub on his trip home to his native planet after being pardoned in his later years.
He takes great care in instructing his young charge, his grandson XXXXX in the ways of the strange inhabitants of a planet whose inhabitants call Earth. He has made the study of these beings a central part of his life in exile (he lived on Mars most of the time). Even by the era of the height of Babylon, he has become concerned about the shortening of the lifespan of humans. It has shortened from 1,00 – 1,500 years to 70 – 90 in the course of a few thousand years. He ‘descends’ to the planet’s surface, disguising his tail to mix with the population to uncover the reason for this alarming trend.
A central feature of the psyche of humans is their unique-in-the-universe custom of entering into, repeatedly, what Beezebub euphemistically refers to as “The Periodic Reciprocal Destruction of Men”, or as humans call it, war. They have no real understanding of why and where these events occur. They cannot because their deranged mentation causes them to perceive reality ‘topsy turvy’. This state is a result of the acquired consequences of the organ Kundabuffer, inserted into mankind by ‘angels’ to prevent him from ‘ever discovering his true purpose’, described objectively as ‘Food for the Moon’.
So G. says we are being farmed for the higher purpose of Grand Universal Harmony because some Higher Being failed to do their job and the job description is so onerous we cannot know it, otherwise we might simply ’cause our own existence to cease’. This has a certain ring to it. It has it’s obvious reflection in modern civil (and uncivil) discourse.
In the myth, this ‘food for the moon’, which necessitates human existence is released when an individual dies. so, immediately Beelzebub understands the why of war, and even the where. Maintaining the common functioning of the ‘atmospheres’ of the Earth and it’s Moon is greatly complicated by the destructive activities engaged in by the Earth’s inhabitants. Early in the tale, Beelzebub promises his grandson that he will later return to what activities of Man result in these so called ‘wars’.
The second last chapter in A&E is titled “In the Opinion of Beelzebub, Man’s Extraction of Electricity from Nature and It’s Destruction During It’s Use, Is One of the Chief Causes of the Shortening of the Life of Man. After 1145 pages of devastating details regarding the terrifying-to-any-individual-of-sane-mentation state of the psyches of the inhabitants of this planet, now we learn, these abnormal conditions of being existence have become so disturbing they are starting to affect not only the inhabitants of their own planet but those of neighboring planets, and in addition making self-perfection more difficult by decreasing the experience of the self-striving necessary. So this makes the deplorable conditions on Earth bad not only for themselves, but innocent others as well.
What Can Be Done?
First, as with all of G.’s writings one has to ask, what part of this is meant literally, and what part is allegory, and how can it be made sense of in the context of the 70 years since Gurdjieff’s death.
This really is the summing up of how Beelzebub spent his time of exile in the Solar System. He describes at length, a chain of events that do lead to an answer to why mankind’s lifespan has become so much shortened during Beelzebub’s time here. His godson, the actual son of the King of the inhabitants of Mars renounces all his work on the Sacred Okidanokh when he himself realizes his experiments were the cause of the lessening of the striving to self-perfection he and his father had noticed in the Martian inhabitants. The culprit was the dynamo he used to power all his experiments. The two opposite electrical poles of an electric current comprise two of the the three components of the scared Okidanokh. Their destruction during their use is equivalent to the destruction of the sacred labors of their ancestors.
There is evidence G. meant this warning literally. Near his death, after WWII in Paris he is quoted as saying “When people understand my teaching there will be no more electric lights”. That was 1949.
This graph shows the growth of electricity production since Gurdjieff’s death. It also shows that growth was fueled almost entirely by coal. The reason is that since 1980, the growth has been fueled in large part by China, with coal. The small drop in coal consumption in the past decade has been more than than made up for with natural gas. All other means of production have been flat or declining except a sprout of wind production that will grow, no doubt.
A couple of points have to be made here that may not be apparent.
First, when we talk about electricity, we really are talking about electromagnetism. The electric current and it’s magnetic field are inextricable.
Second, electricity is consumed as it is produced, it cannot be stored, except indirectly, and production and load must match.
Third, since load is generally not controlled or regulated except informally by societal patterns, significant excess capacity must be on standby to satisfy extreme load conditions.
Fourth, and most important, the final end result of the production of all electricity is the radiation of waste heat into space. No matter what work the electricity is put to, the end result is the inescapable 2nd law of thermodynamics. The worst example was lighting in G.’s day, but now we have electric heat, electronic devices of many kinds AND mow, increasingly electric cars and bicycles. Like ourselves, they actually do little (from a macro physical system point of view) other than radiate heat. Quantum physics demands that even deleting data from your phone results in an increase in entropy.
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