Beelzebub's tales to his grandson

What Hacker News says

1. tanepiperJul 2024
   You word my position here too.

   20's - a rabid Dawkins reading Athiest. 40's - I think Dawkins is an idiot and my favourite book is "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson"

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2. kundiDec 2021
   For your fellow American and other westerners to possibly shine some light onto “the human kernel”, as developers would say.

   Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson by George Guerdjieff

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3. carapaceJan 2020
   "Neurospeak" by Robert Masters

   A psychoactive book, science-based (YMMV).

   https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/897536.Neurospeak

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   Gurdjieff's "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson"

   Impossible to categorize, incredibly challenging. Gurdjieff was a genius on the level of Leonardo da Vinci, but where Leonardo studied the outer world, Gurdjieff studied the inner world. This three-volume tome is his effort to encode and transmit his particular school of thought.

   Gurdjieff has had a deep and obscure influence on Western culture. For example, in the Monty Python's Flying Circus movie "The Meaning of Life" an abridged description of his philosophy is given in the boardroom scene about the meaning of life, right before Terry Jones asks, "What was that about hats?"

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4. artificialLimbsDec 2018
   I see no mention of Gurdjieff's "Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson" here, so here is mention. The entire book is an tour de force of long and complicated sentenceness.
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5. carapaceMay 2020
   > So basically you have to be on board with his sci-fi extended universe in order to grasp the cause behind the central tenet of the Fourth Way: that man is asleep.

   Yes and no. His opus "All and Everything" is comprised of three volumes. The first "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson" (itself divided into three volumes) is the part that is couched as a kind of autobiographical reminiscences of an alien, Beelzebub, to his grandson on the occasion of his pardon and reprieve from exile to Mars. It's allegory. That book is designed to affect the mind of the reader, it's a machine or program, not a book per se.

   > Defining one Gurdjieffism in terms of another Gurdjieffism. Nice.

   Don't be pissy.

   > "Remembering oneself" is, roughly, what Hackernews knows as mindfulness, but seems to involve a lot more

   "Remembering oneself" is literal. As literal as words can be. There was no concept of mindfulness in the West at the time. Buddhism was alien and barely known.

   > following Gurdjieff

   He discouraged followers.

   > (or one of his disciples, or his disciples' disciples, there must be an unbroken chain to the Master you see)

   The Fourth Way is not a lineage school. There may be people out there who try to make something like that out of it, I don't know. I don't hang out with them. The "Eneagram" craze was an example of a kind of degenerate cargo-cult residue of Gurdjieff's effect. But I don't think you should blame him for what people do with his work after he died.

   > around, scrubbing his floors and latrines,

   I'm not sure what you're referring to. Are you upset that he didn't clean the toilets personally at his dance school?

   > and doing his silly dances.

   Have you seen them? They are not silly.

   > Giving him your money also seemed to help.

   He could extract money from people seemingly at will (have you read the story of the time he nearly initiated an orgy?) He also spent lots of money, time, and effort feeding and taking care of elderly people during the war. In Paris if I recall correctly.

   > So why does Gurdjieff say "the sacred Rascooarno" and not "death"?

   To distinguish it from the current concept of death, which is very different. the sacred Rascooarno is a natural molting of the physical body, like a kind of second birth, and life carries on in the second and third being bodies. Our deaths, however, are merely the wearing out of a machine. Not having "coated" higher being-bodies into our physical body by the process of "being-partkdolg-duty" we "die like dogs", leaving nothing.

   > But for Gurdjieff ... it's more like a person has the potential for a soul.

   Exactly! Everyone says "There's a soul" or "There's no such thing" and Gurdjieff comes along and says "You have to make one sucker!"

   It's the first new thing under the sun, eh?

   > Thanks to -- you guessed it -- the maleficent consequences of the organ Kundabuffer,

   You lost me...

   > a soul can only be attained through 20 or 30 years or so in the Work...

   No, you "coat" a "second being-body" and then you "coat" a "third being-body" and then you molt ("the sacred Rascooarno") and leave the Earth to go live in space with cool aliens that like you, or something.

   These higher being bodies are like holograms that you use to store human-style experience in the next world. They're like emulators for your old software, eh?

   > do you see where I'm going with this?

   Yeah, but why? You obviously know a lot of this stuff but seem really unimpressed. Is it so wrong that I got a lot out of G.I. Gurdjieff without becoming some sort of esoteric edgelord weanie?

   I know there are a lot of knobs and fools out there. The "enneagram" craze proves that. But there's also something else there. (Or maybe I'm just crazy. I still haven't quite decided yet.)

   > Anyway, if you had a true friend in the Work,

   I don't.

   > that friend would rebuke you for doing what Gurdjieff specifically enjoined his followers not to do

   Well, fuck em' Gurdjieff didn't appoint a successor, so I'll say what I like to whom I please.

   > attempt to interpret his works to outsiders, lest you transmit wrong information and cause those outsiders to be crystallized in the wrong hydrogens.

   Yeah, this is almost certainly "pearls before swine" but whatever, I'm bored and lonely.

   "What was that about hats?"

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6. qwerty456127Jan 2020
   I've read a portion of Gurdjieff's "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson" and found it boring. Perhaps it would get interesting if I read more.

   But now I'm reading "the fourth way" by Peter Ouspensky, the most famous (if we don't count Joseph Stalin) of his students and find it awesome. Very rational, explaining everything in an exciting, easy to grok way. It feels like a book I would recommend to everyone.

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