Beelzebub’s Buddhas - Rev. José M. Tirado
Micro, Macro, and Mr. Gurdjieff - Elaine M. Jacobs
The Resounding Enneagram: the Seven Note Musical
Scale as a Model of the Universe - Dr. Judith Crispin
Soul-Making in Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson -
Dr. Michael Pittman
This Original Problem I Have Set You: Purgatory–Salzmanino–Deskaldino
- Toddy Smyth
The Self and the I - Dimitri Peretzi
The Will-Power and the Will-of-Presence - Dr. Keith
A. Buzzell
ABSTRACT 1
Beelzebub’s Buddhas
Rev. José M. Tirado
In Beelzebub’s Tales, there are two important Buddhist figures included, in what
I assume is Gurdjieff’s paean to that tradition, as he understood it. The first
was the Buddha himself, Siddhartha Gautama, 563? CE - 483? CE. The second,
“Saint Lama”, is possibly a composite character; reflective of the Tibetan
Buddhism Gurdjieff had been most likely exposed to. He is most likely based upon
Padmasambhava, who brought Vajrayana (Tantric) Buddhism into Tibet in the 8th
century CE. He is also known as Guru Rinpoche, which has been quaintly
translated as Saint Lama.
This idiosyncratic translation suggests that Gurdjieff was familiar with Kagyu
Buddhism and thus the Buddhists in BT reflect a deep respect for these two
extraordinary people. But are they accurate pictures? If not, what might we
glean from this presentation of two of the 12 Sacred Individuals as being
Buddhist? What was Gurdjieff saying in including these men and what might we
learn from their inclusion into this pantheon of the powerful in BT?
Likewise, are there other examples in 4th Way literature that demonstrate
familiarity with Tibetan Buddhism, (most specifically Kagyu), and how is this
helpful to our understanding of and journey on the Fourth Way?
Biographical Resume
Rev. José M. Tirado is a poet, priest and political activist. His articles
and poetry have been published in CounterPunch, The Endless Search, Gurdjieff
Internet Guide, Dissident Voice and Op-Ed News among others. He is a Buddhist
meditation teacher and is currently finishing a second Masters Degree (his first
in Buddhist Studies) in Psychology. He intends on pursuing a PhD in the same
field, exploring the nexus between The Fourth Way and Buddhism and he has
developed a Buddhist meditation-based counseling program which he has conducted
in Iceland where he currently lives. He can be reached via his website: http://www.thepathofmyexperience.com
ABSTRACT 2
Micro, Macro, and Mr. Gurdjieff
Elaine M. Jacobs
Some amazing scientific observations of both the very small and extremely large
have occurred in the generation of Mr. Gurdjieff’s ‘grandchildren’ which appear
to validate much of the “common-cosmic objective science” as he described it in
his fabulous First Series ‘All and Everything.’ Both of the primordial sacred
Laws, of Triamazikamno and Heptaparaparshinokh, are very recently being
explicated by atomic colliders reducing matter to three basic attributes
relative to each other, and telescopes are seeing a regular pattern of
oscillation over billions of light-years that’s been likened to musical Octaves.
The scientific quest for a Unified Theory of Everything has stumbled into the
possible causal significance of the act of observation in forming materiality.
The involuting black holes sucking in Everything are now increasingly seen
paired with explosions of white-hot quasars spewing it All out again, which may
indicate that the Creation of God’s home is still an on-going process, and
physics hints that we may indeed have a crucial role to play in its creation and
maintenance. This offering, combining key points developed in two previous
papers - on the Law of Seven and the generative power of I/Will combined with
Aim and Observation, and the Law of Three describing the primordial reservoirs
of Energy, Matter, and Light - discusses how astronomy, Quantum and String
theories may verify Gurdjieff’s concepts.
Biographical Resume
Elaine Marie Jacobs began her professional personality as an audio recording
engineer in broadcast television and radio, sound studios, and film and stage
productions. This was a quixotic outgrowth of early musical and acoustics
training, including playing with the Butterfield Blues Band and last-chair viola
with the Chicago Symphony at age 17. Following an intensive electronics and
computer course, a ten-year stint ensued as Engineering Computer Technician in
research and development, which included hands-on work on the Hubble Space
Telescope. Concurrently a carpenter for over thirty years, Elaine incorporates
Sacred Geometry into the structures that she designs and builds, most recently
an Enneagram wall in her Movements Hall. She was fortunate to meet an excellent
Fourth Way influenced Teacher in the early 1980s, Pulitzer-nominated author Dr.
Paula Gunn Allen, and in seven years of group study was thrilled to find that
Mr. Gurdjieff’s fabulous tome “All and Everything” made so much sense, and
articulated some hunches. In 2001 she was blessed with an introduction to
Movements in a class near home in Austin, Texas, and since then has travelled to
both U.S. coasts, Europe, and the Dominican Republic for Movements Seminars.
Reading and mulling about science and Spirit is her life-long hobby.
Ms. Jacobs would like to express her gratitude to Sr. Jose Reyes, Mr. Wim van
Dullemen, Ms. Maja Moeser, and Dr. Anya Rylander-Jones for invaluable gifts of
Work opportunities, as well as to the people Working on behalf of the “All and
Everything” Conferences. Many others too numerous to list are also greatly
appreciated.
ABSTRACT 3
The Resounding Enneagram: the Seven Note Musical Scale as a
Model of the Universe
Dr. Judith Crispin
Gurdjieff, in his chapter on the law of Heptaparashinokh, utilizes the musical
seven-note scale to illustrate the two primary laws governing the unfolding of
cosmic processes, the laws of seven and three. These laws, fundamental to
Gurdjieffian cosmology, also underpin the structure of western diatonic music. A
consideration of the functional musical scale engenders a deeper understanding
of the law of Heptaparashinokh, also represented by the Enneagram.
An explanation of complex musical ideas becomes very simple with recourse to
actual sounds, as opposed to words alone. Similarly, Gurdjieffian ideas, such as
the role of semi-tones in a scale, are simplified when, by virtue of an audible
demonstration, the ear quite literally perceives the physical tendency for a
particular note to rise or fall. And, again, the movement from a lower octave to
a higher has a special significance in music, and can be effectively
demonstrated only by sound.
The seven-note scale is comprised of a tri-chord and a tetra-chord, separated by
a semitone. The scale itself is separated from the scale above also by a
semitone. The interval formed by the outside notes of the tri-chord is a major
third, whereas the interval formed by the tetra-chord is the tritone, or
augmented fourth. When one listens to these intervals the unstable and ambiguous
nature of the tritone is immediately apparent when compared to the major third.
The Gurdjieffian idea that the second semi-tone requires a greater shock than
the first, is further elucidated by the audible qualities of these intervals.
This paper aims to examine the cosmological model of the seven-note scale in the
light of functional diatonic music.
Biographical Resume
Dr. Judith Crispin is a composer, mezzo-soprano and musicologist at the
Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. In 2004 Judith graduated
from a Ph.D. in composition from the ANU and, during 2005, she pursued
post-doctoral music research with Emmanuel Nunes in Paris, as an invited scholar
of the Paris Sorbonne.
Judith has been awarded numerous prizes, awards and grants including the 2004
Nancy Van de Vate International Prize for Opera, an Australian Postgraduate
Award, a DAAD research grant, the Harold Allen Memorial Prize for Composition
(twice) and two Wesley Scholarships for voice. Her composition output includes a
number of large orchestral works, including three operas, as well as chamber and
solo pieces. Her work Kesdjan, for Carillon, was commissioned for the marriage
celebrations of Crown Prince Frederik and Mary Donaldson and premiered in
Copenhagen in May 2004. Her scores are published through Sikesdi Press and
Vienna Masterworks.
Judith’s publications include a recent book entitled The Busoni-Sitsky Esoteric
Tradition (The Edwin Mellen Press), The Bird Call Impressions of Hooper
Brewster-Jones (W.A.: The Keys Press. 2006) and ‘Pierre Boulez’ in Music of the
Twentieth Century Avant-garde (Connecticut: Greenwood. 2002).
ABSTRACT 4
Soul-Making in Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson
Dr. Michael Pittman
“Nothing given by God, only Nature give. And Nature only give possibility for
soul, not give soul. Man acquire soul through work. But, unlike tree, man have
many possibilities.”
- (Gurdjieff quoted in Peters, Boyhood with Gurdjieff, 41)
In Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson: An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the
Life of Man, the word soul appears more than sixty times. Gurdjieff refers
specifically to the notion of the soul in the first introductory chapter, “From
the Author,” and afterwards, the soul is sometimes referred to as simply “soul”
but more frequently as “higher being-body,” or one of other similar synonyms.
The term, as deployed in these multiple and often awkward constructions, is used
in a variety of nuanced and intentionally challenging ways. Gurdjieff first
attempts to deconstruct or unhinge in the mind of the reader the ordinary usage
of the word. Thus, as he does with many terms, he makes a variety of gestures
and provocations that are intended to destabilize what seems, on the one hand,
to be a “natural,” readily understood term but which is, in turn, revealed to be
already unstable and imprecise. At the same time, Gurdjieff attempts to redefine
and then reintroduce the term within a long history of thought and experience,
not only according to a particular culture on this planet but within the
framework of a new mythology of the entire created Universe.
This paper will serve as an introduction to the larger discussion of the soul in
Beelzebub’s Tales. I discuss the way these terms are used in the first chapter
of the Tales where Gurdjieff sets up the discussion of the soul and informs the
dialogue between Beelzebub and his Hassein for the remainder of the Tales. Next,
I examine the presentation of the soul in Beelzebub’s Tales found in several key
chapters of the first book. In particular, I look closely at the Tales
concerning the life and work of the character Ashiata Shiemash. The series of
three chapters concerning the life of Shiemash provides a critical analytical
and methodological component to Gurdjieff’s explication of the soul and its
significance in human history. Then I discuss the chapter on Religion, in which
Gurdjieff further examines the notion of the soul as it is constructed and
circulated in religious discourse, both in the past and in his own period. I
conclude by summarizing some of the key points of these chapters and examine the
method of explication that Gurdjieff employs to clarify his view on the
existence of the soul in the rest of the Tales.
Biographical Resume
Dr. Michael Pittman is currently an Assistant Professor of Humanities at the
Albany College of Pharmacy in Albany, New York. He holds a Ph.D. from the State
University of New York at Stony Brook in Comparative Literature and Religious
Studies. The title of his dissertation is G.I. Gurdjieff: Textualizations of
Medieval Oral Storytelling and Modern Oral Teachings on the Soul. The first two
chapters of the dissertation present a discussion of Beelzebub’s Tales to his
Grandson in terms of the correspondences found primarily in medieval literary
textualizations of the 12th to 14th centuries, such as The Arabian Nights and
Boccaccio’s Decameron. The following three chapters provide a close reading of
Beelzebub’s Tales and examine one of the prominent ideas of Gurdjieff’s work,
the conception of the uncreated human soul and the means
ABSTRACT 5
This Original Problem I Have Set You: Purgatory–Salzmanino–Deskaldino
Toddy Smyth
Besides the galoshes those of us forever touched by Gurdjieff’s teaching have
inherited by embarking on the hazardous path of accelerated self-transformation,
I believe Gurdjieff set us, and those who come after us, a direct and specific
problem with a direct injunction to solve it. This problem is presented in the
chapter “A Change in the Appointed Course of the Falling of the Transspace ship
Karnak” and, I highly suspect, it is elaborated in the following chapter, “Just
a Wee Bit More about the Germans.”
Biographical Resume
A pupil of Mrs. A.L. Staveley, Toddy Smyth is currently based in Aurora,
Oregon. She is connected with the group there begun by Mrs. Staveley, known as
Two Rivers Farm, as well as with groups in Holland, Salt Lake City and Maine.
She works for Fifth Press, a small publishing venture with the aim of fostering
a deeper engagement with Gurdjieff’s own writings. At present, Toddy is working
on a revised republication of Man, A Three-Brained Being by Keith A. Buzzell.
ABSTRACT 6
The Self and the I
Dimitri Peretzi
The general description that Gurdjieff gave for human personality is based on
the image that when man ‘thinks’, when he ‘feels’ or when he ‘acts’, he is never
fully present at what is going on. Each time he is only aware of a small part of
him; never of the totality he calls ‘myself’. The Work ideas incorporate the
notion that without the proper efforts to develop and without the conscious
struggle to approach unity, man’s behavior ends up being a never ending chance
succession of temporary petty ‘bosses of the mind’.
This image, exotic as some might still think it to be, happens to be compatible
with models for the functioning of the mind proposed by today’s philosophers.
Daniel Dennett sees behavior as the result of the haphazard control of
electromagnetic impulses, which he calls ‘demons’. Owen Flanagan states, “there
is no antecedent metaphysical ego. But there is an important sense in which
experiences are structured by whatever personality has developed and is in place
at any given moment.”
This presentation investigates questions like, “how are we to view the exact
relationship between the total of the Self and the partial entities we call
‘different I’s’?” “What is the neurophysiologic basis of this differentiation?
And most interesting, “in what way does knowledge of this fragmentation help in
the quest for unity?”
Biographical Resume
Mr. Peretzi is the president of the Gurdjieff Foundation of Greece. With
reference to his personal contacts with eminent students of Gurdjieff, Lord
Pentland, Madame de Salzmann, Dr. Welch and others, he has authored a number of
books and articles that study the problem of consciousness, relating views from
the esoteric traditions to those of of the contemporary philosophy of mind.
Mr. Peretzi did graduate work in Philosophy, at Yale, where he received his
Master of Architecture. Having settled in Athens since 1974, he established his
own Construction and Prefabication Company.
ABSTRACT 7
The Will-Power and the Will-of-Presence
Dr. Keith A. Buzzell
In the chapter “The Holy Planet Purgatory” of Beelzebub’s Tales Gurdjieff sets
down a perspective on the Will of Endlessness that has aspects that differ
considerably from traditional Eastern and Western spiritual and philosophical
perspectives.
Because of the acceleration of involutional changes taking place in our present
world, it is important to define and explore Gurdjieff’s views more thoroughly
than they have been in the half-century since his death. Bringing greater
clarity to Gurdjieff’s cosmogony and cosmology can have specific and positive
effects on all three lines of Work.
Two aspects of Gurdjieff’s conception of the Will of Endlessness will be focused
upon:
1) The Will-Power - that force and capacity to create the existent material
Universe and to have it proceed to unfold “automatically”.
2) The Will-of-Presence (or the Will-to-Return) - enabled by the
“actualizations” of Endlessness regarding certain of the Tetartocosmoses which
made possible the formation of Kesdjan and Higher Being bodies.
The presentation will address such questions as:
How is it possible to reconcile an “automatic” creation, wherein unbreakable
laws determine all the interactions of mass and energy, with a “Will” which can
be ‘free’ of those laws? Does time (the Heropass) play a role in this
reconciliation? Does Endlessness enter the Universe by revelation, by fiat?
What is the nature of His actualizations? How can compassion and wisdom enter
the “automatic” creation?
The presentation will draw on quotations from Beelzebub’s Tales and from other
of Gurdjieff’s writings, contrasting and integrating those views with
perspectives put forward by Eastern and Western spiritual teachings and modern
scientific investigations.
Biographical Resume
Dr. Keith A. Buzzell is a 1960 graduate of the Philadelphia College of
Osteopathic Medicine. He is presently a member or the staff of Northern
Cumberland Memorial Hospital in Bridgton and of clinical Medicine in Beddeford.
Dr. Buzzell speaks from a broad perspective deriving from his life as a
musician, musicologist, author, teacher, researcher, and physician. He is
presently in Family practice in Fryeburg where he also serves as Medical
Director of Hospice of Western Maine. He met Irmis Popoff (N.Y. Foundation) in
1971 and formed groups under her supervision into the 1980s. Dr. Buzzell met
Annie Lou Staveley, founder of the Two Rivers Farm in Oregon, in 1988 and
maintained a Work relationship with her up to her death. He continues group Work
in Bridgton, ME.