All And Everything:

Beelzebub's Tales

To His Grandson

Gurdjieff was very clear, all prospective students should read his monumental All & Everything, Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson.

Not only that, students should read it three times:

once for God
once for your parents &
once for yourself

At 1,000 pages of science-fiction-like satire written in a bizarre Victorian-era prose and regularly interspersed by impossible to pronounce multi-syllabic foreign phrases (dragged from all over Europe & Central Asia) which usually represent particular modes of morality or states of consciousness, Beelzebub's Tales is no easy read. In fact, I believe that Beelzebub's Tales has been written so you can't read it. I'll go even further:

Unless you surrender to Gurdjieff and read Beelzebub's Tales in a different way, more precisely, with a different part of your brain, it will never make sense.

Now, I fully realise that the sentence above may not really make much sense either but unfortunately, it's just about the best I can do.

Gurdjieff spent six years writing Beelzebub's Tales, fully intending it to be a legonomism, a fully-formed teaching module that would last through time. Consequently, like working with a teacher, if you try to approach it intellectually, you will fail. Please believe me, I'm not being mysterious intentionally but you cannot hope to discover what Gurdjieff intended by "reading" Beelzebub's Tales in a normal way.

So, how do you read it?

Like a really naughty Jedi, I can't tell you. You'll have to find that out for yourself...but I will give you a fortune cookie hint:

What you're meant to discover has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the text.

Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson

By the way, Gurdjieff could write beautiful uncomplicated prose when he wished. His Meetings With Remarkable Men is a wonderful, easy read, and is an autobiography of sorts.

Of course, it's not meant to be taken literally and Gurdjieff historians have tied themselves in knots trying to prove or disprove whether Gurdjieff could have been where he claimed to be at such and such a time. Silly people!

Meetings With Remarkable Men is meant to be allegorical, with each chapter built around an important aspect of his teaching, e.g. his teenage "love" for a girl which almost resulted in his death through a silly duel. What he's actually saying is that to follow these childish feelings and give them a power that they don't deserve is dangerous. In fact it can kill you.

Meetings With Remarkable Men (book)

If you're interested in reading the thoughts of a master disguised as autobiography that is heavy on metaphor and ruse, then Meetings With Remarkable Men could be the thing for you.

In the late 1970s there was a po-faced over-serious film version made that was directed by Englishman Peter Brook and included a scene reconstructing some of Gurdjieff's famous "temple dances".

Meetings With Remarkable Men the movie is certainly a curio in that it's a western movie about a "guru's" life but since I haven't seen it for 30 years or so, I wouldn't like to make any substantive comments about it. I believe that it's recently become available on DVD.

Meetings With Remarkable Men (DVD)

"...Based upon Gurdjieff's book, Meetings with Remarkable Men is the story of his search through the Middle East and Central Asia for answers to the question of the meaning of life. The film, directed by Peter Brook, was made on location in the mountains and deserts of Afghanistan, and has been widely acclaimed for its unique visual beauty. A stunning adaptation to the screen..." Amazon blurb