October Gathering 2016 ~ Thursday Evening

“And further, His Highness also explained that this cosmic substance, the
Sacred Askokin, exists in general in the Universe chiefly blended with the
sacred substances ‘Abrustdonis’ and ‘Helkdonis,’ and hence that this sacred
substance Askokin in order to become vivifying for such a maintenance must
first be freed from the said sacred substance Abrustdonis and Helkdonis.
“To tell the truth, my boy, I did not at once clearly understand all that he
then said, and it was only later that I came to understand it all clearly, when,
during my studies of the fundamental cosmic laws, I learned that these
sacred substances Abrustdonis and Helkdonis are just those substances by
which the higher being-bodies of three-brained beings, namely, the body
Kesdjan and the body of the Soul, are in general formed and perfected;
and when I learned that the separation of the sacred Askokin from the said
sacred substances proceeds in general when the beings on whatever planet it
might be transubstantiate the sacred substances Abrustdonis and Helkdonis
in themselves for the forming and perfecting of their higher bodies, by
means of conscious labors and intentional sufferings.1

Keith: I think it would be useful if we were to share impressions on how we have come to
understand the very essential terms in this brief quotation: Askokin,2 Abrustdonis, Helkdonis
and then conscious labor and intentional suffering, but especially the first three because
it may clarify a great many things about our Work. It helps us a great deal when we have a
particular way of understanding what Gurdjieff is talking about here. This is inclusive now
of his image of the Earth, the Moon and Anulios. He is talking about something having its
origin in the Earth, passing to the Moon and Anulios, however we understand this, and that
are within Askokin, Abrustdonis and Helkdonis.
Let’s start with those. What are your impressions? How do you understand Askokin?3
What does it mean to you? I made an error here, as Askokin is discussed quite early in
Beelzebub’s Tales.
“’This custom is at present so widespread there, and the destruction of the
existence of beings of various forms for this maleficent purpose has reached
such dimensions, that there is already a surplus of the “Sacred Askokin”
required from the planet Earth for its former parts, that is to say, a surplus
of those vibrations which arise during the sacred process of “Rascooarno” of
beings of every exterior form arising and existing on that planet from which
the said sacred cosmic arising is required.4
Participant: To quote you, which has deepened my understanding of so much, you have
said to us so many times that Askokin is simply life experience. It is the activity upon this
planet that creates the vibrations necessary to maintain the Moon and Anulios, to maintain

1 G.I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales, p 1106

2 Ibid., pp 183-34
3 K.A. Buzzell, Reflections on Gurdjieff’s Whim, “Askokin,” pp 86-87
4 Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales, pp 182-83

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that which we have become separate from or less and less aware of–the relationship of
our emotions and our physical life to that in which we continually find ourselves with our
improper understanding of our intellectual capacities. I would say Askokin is life experience
that feeds those broken off parts.
Keith: Any other impressions, disagreements, modifications?
Participant: I think we could be a little more general and start with the idea that man is a
transforming apparatus where all of the energies which come to us. Of course life experience
includes all that but many things are included that are not perceived by us to be life experi-
ence. That which we are not aware of, the processes of our body, those things which could
be studied but are not normally coming to our experience or attention, those things that are
involved in the third striving, knowing more about the motion of the laws and bodies around
us which could come into our experience in some way, we could become aware of but not
necessarily.
Keith: Okay, that broadens the definition of experience to include that which we are not
necessarily aware of. We must include now, in view of the error I made, to enlarge Askokin
to include ‘death’ expressions of all beings of all exterior forms.
Participant: I have a question. Wouldn’t Askokin also include the whole of la-sol-fa
interval in the Great Ray? So then wouldn’t it be that all life on Earth feeds the Moon and
Anulios? All experience of all life?
Keith: I don’t think so mostly because Gurdjieff seems to be putting this in the context
of three-brained beings. When he speaks about Abrustdonis and Helkdonis, this certainly
would not apply to one- and two-brained beings.
Participant: I agree with that but if the separation of Abrustdonis and Helkdonis can take
place in three-brained beings but would that mean necessarily that Askokin is not something
that all life is emanating.
Keith: As I understand it, what Gurdjieff is talking about here is that this is the task that
is before us through conscious labor and intentional suffering to separate Abrustdonis and
Helkdonis from Askokin. From that context, I don’t think he was inferring or including other
forms of life; he was talking about us, three-brained beings.
Participant: However, we are responsible for the separation. If we stay for a moment with
Askokin as the total of all experience, conscious and unconscious, two-brained beings don’t
have the capacity to separate out conscious labor and intentional suffering from feelings and
sensation associations; they don’t have the capacity to take those apart but, in that sense, it
is the process of life that is trapped within it but the potential cannot be released without
conscious labor and intentional suffering.
Participant: Keith and I saw this little video about an elephant, who, a year before the
elephant was a baby and a man saved this elephant’s life. A year later this man was swimming
in the river and the elephant perceived the man was in trouble. She waded into the water
and you could see her pick up speed to reach him and save his life. He was smiling the
whole time because he wasn’t really in trouble but she perceived he was in trouble. She got
him between her two front legs and guided him to shore and then put her trunk down and
scooped him up and put him on the shore.

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 Here’s a whole year later that this event occurs and it seems to me that that is certainly
an experience in the life of this two-brained being. But the man’s experience is something
that, in his Askokin, that there can be a separation of Abrustdonis and Helkdonis.
Participant: Somewhere here is there a question of the relationship to meaning? Meaning
is an experience and meaning opens deeper experiences. So that unusual experience was
an experience of feeling in the elephant. I can’t see how the elephant could have got higher
meaning out of that, without a third brain. So part of our responsibility is that we can extract
meaning.
Participant: Is that part of extracting Abrustdonis and Helkdonis because we can do that?
Participant: It seems to me meaning is potentially everything but you need an instrument
able to take those things apart to find meaning inside.
Keith: Which part of us gives meaning?
Participant: The process comes from the frontal lobes but a sense of meaning also seems
to come from here [points to chest].
Participant: I seem to remember that you yourself have said that the third brain exists in
varying degrees of development throughout the animal kingdom so it is not in such a black
and white situation as to who is a three-brained being.
Keith: No, I never said that; everything you said up to that was correct. Once it begins to
be brained then we have to give consideration to elements that are already there that will
develop over time into the second brain and, eventually, the third brain. That much is true
but not that the third brain is there in any sense or the second brain is there but there are
elements of it that take vast geological time, hundreds of millions of years, to differentiate.
We can say specifically that a one-brained being has one brain. Does it have cellular
elements that over time are going to differentiate into the second brain and the third brain?
Likely. This is especially true, in what evidence there is out there in neurophysiology today,
about the third brain. It is very interesting. Even Paul MacLean, who was an absolute
underpinning of all modern investigation of brained beings, if you will, he spent years
investigating reptiles but, in all of his studies, he could never find the origin of the second
brain, neuroanatomically and made the statement that as far as we know we don’t know the
true origin of the limbic, emotional brain. That it came from somewhere is obvious, but as
far as a cellular origin that could be identified in creatures over geological time, no. He was
never able to find anything specific. So it is an interesting mystery, an interesting question
where the limbic system how it actually originated.
I’d like us to enlarge this question because if we talk about the Earth, Moon and Anulios,
then this is an image that Gurdjieff makes use of about the Earth but he is talking about the
Earth. This is a word that has a certain context of meaning in the context of Earth–Moon–
Anulios. So what is he talking about here? Is he talking about us, about parts of us? And if so,
what is the Earth? What is the Moon? What is Anulios?
Because I think it is consistent with Gurdjieff’s intent in the whole of The Tales, let’s
enlarge the image even further. He sets out a picture of Beelzebub coming to Mars, being
exiled to Mars. Mars is a planet in this solar system; the Earth is another planet. Saturn is
spoken of as another planet. Those three are spoken of in great length in different parts of
Beelzebub’s Tales. Venus is mentioned once very briefly. No fantasy or imaging of a meaning

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of the Earth, Moon, Anulios, Mars, Saturn, the solar system is made use of or is found in any
other literature. It is only with Gurdjieff that we get this image. What does it mean? What
does it mean to have Earth, Moon, Anulios, Mars, Saturn, Solar System? 5
He mentions solar system in one place in particular, remember? The Sun that neither
lights nor heats? What does that mean? Here he mentions the Sun and here we have an
Earth, Moon, Anulios and Saturn. These are the major points in the drama. I think they
have very clear and specific meaning which can be enormously helpful when we are trying
to untangle so many of those events and allusions that Gurdjieff makes throughout The Tales.
If we have some way of saying, for me, this image of Earth –Moon –Anulios means
this, and Mars means, and Saturn means this, and the sun means this and if there is a
consistency to the way in which we look at all that, in other words, that it becomes a kind of
way of understanding the images that he has created, then that makes a big difference. It
means I can take many of the stories in The Tales and the allusions he makes and put them
somewhere. I can ‘make sense of it’ because it will have a certain meaning in a context.
If Saturn has something to do with the higher intellect, then his essence friend,
Gornahoor Harharkh, has a certain meaning. He represents some action within higher
intellectual center, even more important, his son, his offspring, his Kesdjanian offspring,
Gornahoor Rakhoorkh; again a Saturn being has even more significance in the context of
what Gurdjieff has created–making use of Saturn in the way in which he does. Remember it
is from Saturn where Beelzebub leaves the solar system. He has to wait on Saturn because
the star ship can’t get him to the smaller planets; it can only come to Higher Intellectual
Center, Saturn.
So what then is Mars? The obvious effort that I made at some point was to build an
image of the whole of this solar system that was built on maybe simple-minded premises on
my part, but always they have turned out to be kind of useful.
If the sun that neither lights nor heats is the fact that I have no I, that I have no real Will,
that the surface of my sun is cold and would rather borrow heat from something else than a
source for itself. If my sun, if our individual sun, if our I is not present, then that is one way
of understanding the sun neither lights nor heats. Now we have a solar system that has a sun
that neither lights nor heats–no I–so we have an Earth, a Moon and Anulios.
In one of the earliest and, for me, profound insights into the evolution of the brains
concern the experiment with the brain of a frog. The cell layer of what is going to become,
evolutionally, the third brain is stripped off. It still has an evolved first brain but it has no
third brain component. If you take that frog and you set in on the edge of the pool, it will
stand there. If you push it in, it swims and climbs out and stands. If you take a morsel of
food and push it into its mouth, it swallows. If you offer it food, it doesn’t move. If you did
nothing, in about three days, the frog has not eaten; it has not initiated out into the world,
beyond itself. If you intrude into its world, you activate those impulses that are already inside.
It will swallow, it will swim, but it will not be self-initiatory in any shape, way or form.
This was one way to understand, the most primal way to understand, the third brain.
The most primal function is commitment into the world–to move from wherever you are to
go into the world–to react to–to respond into–to use your senses into. Without that initiative
that comes from the third brain, nothing happens; we simply are frozen on the edge of the
pool. That is the Earth in my analogy in The Tales. The Earth is our third brain; it is the
source of initiation of all life events. We would be totally nothing; we would be an organism

5 K.A. Buzzell, Gurdjieff’s Whim, “The Solar System,” pp 26-27

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frozen in space. Without the third brain, quite aside from all its rather miraculous capacities
that are built into it over time, the most primal, most essential aspect is that it is the initiator
into life. Without it, nothing happens.
Participant: Clarification. Even single-celled animals initiate so how do we understand
that?
Keith: There are no single-celled ‘animals’.
Participant: I had an image that came to mind when people were talking about the
separation of the Helkdonis from the sacred Askokin. Elsewhere in The Tales, Gurdjieff
uses Djartklom as a separation. I have the image of Askokin somehow separating these
forces or something creates this Askokin that breaks apart or things are extracted from it.
If Askokin was generated from just life on the planet itself, animal and vegetable life and
all the creatures and we have that within ourselves so maybe individual humans generate
Askokin from the three centers we have and so that, when we work on ourselves, somehow
these energies, sensation, feeling and thought, something can happen to them, some kind
of transformation can take place. I believe it was Bennett who said that Abrustdonis being
the Higher Emotional Center and Helkdonis being the Higher Intellectual Center–that
when the sort of Djartklom can occur within us, these energies within us can feed parts of
ourselves.
Keith: Good. This is a little further down the road, when we get into the nature of
Abrustdonis and Helkdonis.
To stay with the analogy, if the Earth is the third brain, then the Moon is the physical
body; we are under the gravitational influence of the Moon. He speaks of the Moon as being
an influence in human life, the Moon that moves us all around, etc..
The Moon becomes an indicator of the physical body and then all the actions and activ-
ities that the physical body becomes involved in, because it is all passive; it’s all reactive. We
move the physical body because we want a get cup of coffee, we’ve got to go to work; we
have to take a shower, etc.. There has to be something that initiates the action of the Moon,
of the physical body. The Moon is the first brain in the sense of physical movement into the
world.
Anulios is pretty obvious in us because Anulios is that little tiny planet that grandmothers
used to tell myths about. To me, the proper image of Anulios is that this is in most of us what
our real emotional center is. It has lost its ability to respond to myth. There are places where
Gurdjieff speaks about myth being the language of our emotional center. So it is pretty
obvious if you don’t respond to the myth, you have lost some connection to that part of
yourself. So Anulios becomes this tiny little planet which is very hard to find and most of
us have totally lost the ability to image where it might be.
So if we have our three brains lined up in this way, what then is Mars? This is where
Beelzebub was exiled. This carries us further into the kind of imaging we are forced to
invent. Beelzebub cannot be like us. He is after all born on Karatas and taken as a young
being onto Holy Sun Absolute. He already has a Higher Being-body, already has Conscience.
He cannot have a physical body like you or I. That should be very obvious from early on. We
should not fall into the trap anywhere in The Tales of assuming that, when he is talking about
Beelzebub being here and there that he is physically present; that is really not the point.
In any case, Mars is the only place Beelzebub can have a home while he is in exile. He
can visit the other planets; he is given permission and the wherewithal to do that; he was

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given a spaceship so he can go visit the other planets if he so chooses but Mars is his home;
that is where he becomes established.
For me, Mars is Higher Emotional Center. That is the body of Beelzebub. This is his
‘physical’ body. The Will, or Higher Reason, is Beelzebub’s highest center or body. These
are the three bodies of Beelzebub for me and it seems to be consistent with other parts of
The Tales.
Saturn then obviously becomes Higher Intellectual Center and all of the allusions to
Saturn, the roles that it plays: the ravens, all the images of Gornahoor and all the interest-
ing complications that come from that, the creation of the Teskooano, the visitation of
Gornahoor to Mars in order to set up the Teskooano, all of this is an interesting interplay that
you can explore if you take this as the interaction and interplay between Higher Intellectual
and Higher Emotional Centers. It gives it a substrate that you can test things against and
asks, “Does this make sense and is this consistent?”.
Now we get back to Askokin. If, in this context, we have Earth – Moon – Anulios and
we have the totality of experience, however the additional impressions that were offered
were all useful and we can stretch it that far because we are really talking about the totality
of experience that is, in Gurdjieff’s image, which is initiated by the third brain; it is not
dependent upon outside; it is dependent upon itself to be self-initiator of whatever is going
to happen. That’s the kind of experience we are not necessarily aware of it but we still initiate
all kinds of things from our imaginations, from our dreams, from our hopes and so forth that
are often never put into precise language–often we wouldn’t know how to speak them out;
they simply are urges, wishes, whatever.
So, in this context, if we have Askokin, as the totality of experience up to death, well just
think in an everyday kind of way, what is your life experience? You get up and have a shower
and go to the bathroom, have breakfast, go to work, have lunch and then you do this and
then you do this and then you go out to dinner, maybe you go to a meeting–whatever it is
that you do, whatever that mix of life experiencings, within that there are going to be certain
possibilities, there are going to be certain levels of relationship for instance where you are
going to have contact with your son or with your daughter-in-law or with your grandchild or
with a neighbor. It will be the beginning, the initiation, the origin of some emotionally-based
interaction.
What becomes of it? How do we dismiss it or endorse it? How do we respond to it? Do
we see it the context of self and what this means to me? Is this a compliment? Is this an
insult? Is this a challenge? Or this a need on part of other that I feel responsible for trying to
address? Do I feel that? It is different if I am focused on self, then I am in my biology, I am
defensive of this experience and it only means something to me in my physical body. It does
not mean anything for the other person, child or whatever.
In terms of Abrustdonis, this is food but it is food that is going up into the world of
relationship with other. There are so many, they can be extremely brief or they can be more
prolonged but we have extended experiences every day with other people, other beings.
In that whole range of experience we have during the day, how often are we open to their
world–to their concerns, to their interests, to their needs? How often are we in that world
with them? Or, are we simply very much occupied with what we are doing at the moment
and this is “oh, yeah, great to see you again…” and away we go into our own world. How
often during the day are we in relationship? How often are we existence in the world of
self-other? Not self, but in the world of self-other. This is the interface of Abrustdonis; this

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is the separation of the higher emotional world possibilities from the physical level of our
emotional world interactions.
Later, we will go into the origin of experiences that can stop at the level of our own
physical body, our own DNA that has to do with our uniqueness out of which all of our
feelings of self become so very vital to the physical survival of the physical body. In that
physical survival there is an emotional nature that is protective of the body and it is an
important survival in the emotional sense and we see this in all of the emotional ‘defensive-
nesses’ that we observe in ourselves throughout the day. Also, we feel this in the insults,
when we are put down, when we are criticized, when we act not is the fashion of self-other,
not in the fashion of what-is-your-need but rather, we defend ourselves.
So we have an emotional value but that emotional value is totally in terms of self.
Biochemically as well as through our DNA, all of that comes from the early steps from
the digestion of food and air. We will get more into that later also.
In any event, Abrustdonis would apply to those interactions that have an emotional
potential; developing and being an expression of a real self-other relationship, up to and
including Conscience, although not necessarily Conscience–it may not go that high.
We would have a hard time justifying all of the jocularity, all our interactions with our
grandchildren if we find a couple of them arguing with each other or fighting and we step in
and play a game and dissolve that kind of altercation that was in motion and if we do that,
we can do that in the context of seeing into the world of self-other but we would have a hard
time calling that Conscience. That is just common sense in the sense that this is how you
deal with youngsters who need a little guidance now and then to get out of a fix that they find
themselves in. Incidentally, they are in that fix because of the early steps in the digestion of
food and air. They are in it because this is the self and they are expressing the self and there
is nothing wrong with that but they have to be invited into the world of self-other. We are the
tools for that, as parents, grandparents, neighbors–we are the tools for bringing them into
the world of self-other–Abrustdonis.
Helkdonis–help-for-God obviously involves efforts in the arena of Higher Intellectual
Center. This is the effort to understand law. That is a very broad statement. Bennett does
such a great job of exploring and understanding law, individual law as well as the principle of
law that involves an understanding of the Law of Three in particular, Affirming, Reconciling
and Denying and how these combine.
It involves making an effort to understand what is going on. Why is this happening
the way it is happening? We have a marvelous illustration of the effort we can make in our
present dilemma of what is happening in our political climate in the United States. You can
ask: what the hell is going on? Because it is all lawful, everything has a reason for why it is
going the way it is going. What are the reasons? How do I understand what is going on in the
world? What does it mean when people do this kind of thing to each other and then they say
these kinds of things? What does it mean? This is Helkdonis. It is an effort to understand this
simple question.
When I think to myself what is the earliest significant question that I can remember?
Aside from the obvious, such as when is supper, can I go out and play? I don’t mean that
kind of thing. The earliest question I can remember is: I don’t understand what is happening.
What is going on? What is happening here? I was about 3½–4 years old. I think all of us
are about that age when these questions appear. How is this happening? This is implicitly a
question that has to do with Higher Intellectual Center, eventually.

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 I say eventually because we have to have a lot of things to accumulate along the way,
such as language, concepts, a basic understanding of process in order to even understand
the question of what is going on. We have to have some way of putting things together so we
can test them out. All of that takes time but the question can be there at a very, very young
age and be there, significantly: what’s going on? Or an alternative, the same question but
asked in a different way: how does this happen?
When I was at school, the teacher gave a demonstration of a simple leverage system
and how it worked. He put it together and then he left it there by his desk. Part of our
assignment was to figure out how many pounds did you have to pull on this in order to lift so
many pounds over here? Three or four of us were working trying to figure this thing out and
I remember I had this colossally significant moment that lasted maybe a half second or less
when I saw it move and I saw why it moved. And I remember I was so excited that I ran up
to the teacher and said, “I saw it! I just saw it!” But he didn’t know what he was talking about.
He didn’t know what I was talking about.
All of us have had moments like that when we saw something about how things happen
and then maybe we lost it but it didn’t matter. The mere fact that we had the capacity for
seeing how something happens–that is the significant part of it because the hall mark, the
first indicator of Higher Intellectual Center is what should be set off with the first conscious
shock.
There is so much appropriate attention given to the role of Attention. Gurdjieff is
inveterate. He never gets away from this: you must learn, firstly, to recognize and to use your
Attention but, over time, end up using it to explore yourself. The Attention is the key that he
never, never retreats from. You cannot explore Abrustdonis or Helkdonis without Attention.
It simply won’t happen. It won’t happen because you are warm-hearted or generous in your
basic nature. That’s very nice to be that way, but it is also very ordinary in the sense that it
comes from our biology. It does not come from any effort that you make, that any of us make.
The kind of change that he is talking about here, Abrustdonis or Higher Emotional
Center function, this is a different story altogether. This is placing oneself consciously in the
position of other, just like he puts in the admonition over the entrance to Purgatory.
So that is the image that I have found to be very useful. The whole of our solar system:
the Sun that neither lights nor heats, the absence of I and then these individual planets
which he chooses to put into the drama but he leaves out a whole bunch of other planets
and we have to have the question, why? Or what do these planets mean? Why does he not
talk about Jupiter or Venus or Mercury?
Participant: Let’s go back to Mars for a minute. The thought occurs to me that Mars
in Greek and Roman mythology is the site of war and struggle. Beelzebub is exiled there
because he doesn’t understand why God does things the way he does. Maybe Mars sym-
bolizes the struggle for self-perfection inwardly rather than outwardly. Mars is the site of
the world within us perhaps between our one nature and our higher natures.
Keith: That is a possibility. Gurdjieff himself alludes (and I can’t remember where I read
this) to the fact that Mars is understood the way it was 10,000 years ago, before the Romans.
And there he spoke about the great struggle but it was an emotional struggle; it was not
physical warfare.
Participant: When you speaking about Helkdonis, I had an interesting insight. You were
speaking of Helkdonis as being help-for-god, but also that seems to be the development of

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reason, a source of reason. As a schoolteacher, if I ask why is that a help for God but it seems
directly related. If I am with my kids and some of the kids are developing reason it makes
my job so much easier because then I don’t have to the same sort of work because as soon as
I’ve got kids in the classroom demonstrating reason, developing reason, I am not in the same
position; my role is changed. And so by three-brained beings developing reason I can see
why that is help-for-god, his load is lighter by us being able to reason.
Keith: There is an interesting analogy to that for those of you who are familiar with the
Symbol of the Cosmos in the unfolding of the Lateral Octave.

Ray of
Great Ray Creation Gamma,
World 1 – Absolute Xray &
DO
Ultraviolet
MI
World 3 – All SI
Worlds
World Bio-
Lateral of Moons photons
World 6 – All Suns LA MI All Life
Octave fa

World 12 – Sun SOL do World

of Planets sol
ELF waves
FA la Brained Life
FA fa
World 24 – All FA si
Planets World
si sol
la sol fa Organic Life of Suns SOL
on Earth do la
SOL
sol
World 48 – Earth MI mi LA si
do fa
SI la
Detail of a
World 96 – Moon RE re Lateral Octave
DO LA insiSymbol form
sol
do
SI la fa
SOL
The unfolding comes down from the level of the Sun through the Planetary World and
finally into Life. But then when brained beings emerge, the octave turns and then begins to
go from one brain to two brains to three brains to Kesdjan and Higher Being-body. So it rises
from World 48 to World 24 laws so it is an analogy to World 24 as in the descent into the
Lateral Octave and then finally to World 12, to the triad of the Higher Being-body which is
then a World 12 container which apexes in World One.
This Symbol raises a great many questions about what is the purpose of this, a lot of hair-
raising questions about what is the purpose of this? If Gurdjieff speaks as he does about man
being, potentially, help-for-god, in the enlarging Universe, then the essentiality of the Lateral
Octave gets raised. Given this outflow that comes from the level of the Sun and unfolds
through the planetary world to the planet and then begins the reversal, the ascent, lawfully
all the way back to World 12 to its origin, what is to happen? If in the Lateral Octave there
is not that unfolding to Kesdjan into Higher Being-body–if it is not sufficient in numbers of
those beings who can transform to that level, if there is not that, then the Lateral Octave is in
danger of failing. What does that mean? Well, the Lateral Octave fills the fa-mi of the Great
Ray so it becomes a much more interesting and colossally more significant development
to consider the failure of the Lateral Octave in the context that Lateral Octave filling the
fa-mi of the Great Ray. The most comforting thought I have about that is that they have
now estimated that 10,000 billion galaxies, so there are a lot of efforts there. There is a lot
of potential out there so if we screw up and we go down the tube then that’s not the story
for the Universe.

9
Participant: The illustration of A Symbol of the Cosmos and its Laws gives a visual image
of the consequences of the failure of the Lateral Octave. It concerns the whole Universe as
much as it concerns us, it is definitely a big concern.
There is a paragraph in The Tales that I think puts into context the concern for us that
Beelzebub has.
“The aspect of this fundamental question regarding the significance of
the sense and aim of the existence of your favorites is so important for the
understanding of a great deal that proceeds there on the Earth, and by
the way also of the question touching the causes of war, that I consider it
necessary to refer to it once more.
“I first learned that the destiny of beings arising on this planet of yours
is chiefly to elaborate – by means of the process of their existence – the
vibrations required by Nature for the maintenance of those former parts
of the planet now called Moon and Anulios, when, do you remember,
I became worthy personally to converse for the second time with His
Conformity the then still Angel, but now Archangel, Looisos.
“His Conformity then told me that although the movements of both
former parts of the planet Earth were now already finally regulated with
the general harmony of movement and that every kind of apprehension
of some or other surprise in the near future had absolutely vanished, yet
to avoid any possible complications in the distant future it had been expli-
citly decided by the Most High, Most Sacred Individuals to actualize the
‘corresponding’ on the planet for the formation of what is called the Sacred
Askokin so that this sacred cosmic substance, required for the maintenance
of that planet’s former parts, might continuously issue from that planet.6
So the circumstance in which Beelzebub finds among Hassein’s favorites, among us, is
what prompted him to go into speaking with Hassein about this sacred substance, Askokin,
and how it can, consciously, become something that gives meaning and significance to
Hassein’s favorites and the planet Earth. So I just thought that that was the context for
what we are speaking about.
Keith: It certainly precedes the attention to Abrustdonis and Helkdonis.
Participant: Is it like a set-up tool?
Participant: When you speak of Abrustdonis, it reminds me of a paper that is attributed to
Mr. Gurdjieff entitled A Normal Being Wishes to Live Forever where he talks about fishing
in the stream of life. What you said reminded me of what he wrote in that paper about the
three streams of feeling, thought and physical sensation and what we extract we can make
our own and that seems to be what you are talking about.
Keith: If this is not a conscious process, the Earth–Moon–Anulios goes on and in this text
they are all part of the Earth, in other words, part of our created-ness. There is nothing
higher about the Moon or Anulios. Anulios is the emotional part of us that comes from
our DNA, from food. It means that this is much of the underpinning of the emotional life
of animals, of two-brained beings–not bad–I do not mean it in that context. But both the

6 G.I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales, pp 1105-06

10
terrifying in terms of defense of the hive or the defense of the tribe or the hunting and all
the emotional connotations of family life within the world of animals––all of that is coming
from food and the do-re-mi of air. None of it is in the upper octave of air. It cannot reach
above the mi of air.
Participant: Although in some of the higher primates we see the beginning of that in
dolphins that have self-awareness and show empathy, like the elephants. Isn’t that the
beginning of something that is moving evolutionarily?
Keith: Yes, sure. None of these are sharp boundaries; I don’t think they can be but we do
see and we can identify very readily amongst two-brained, warm-blooded beings that there
is a family life that arises with intrauterine life, with breast-feeding, nurturing and play
behaviors in the young–all of these are completely normal reflections of a warm-blooded
existence. And there is much in there that we should complement; it is good to see that kind
of activity going on but it is still automatic. It happens because they are made that way. That
is their inner machinery; the way their brains function. They don’t function in the way in
which they function because they choose to be that way.
When we are the Earth–Moon–Anulios, there is no choice. That’s life. That’s life on the
planet.
Participant: Is the Askokin described in the passage that was just read, the responsibility
of Looisos and his cronies making things happen?
Keith: It depends on which kind of image you have of angelic influences. To me, Gurdjieff
makes quite a point of emphasizing the very poor perception into the possibilities of man
that comes from the angelic world. They made terrible mistakes. They turned out to be
mistakes for us because they didn’t see the consequences; they didn’t see the state of man
in potential. There are a thousand myths about this, such as Conference of the Birds where
man is not understood by all the other creatures; he is not understood for his potential; he is
understood for all the wacky and terrible things we do and so we are put down by these other
creatures. The Master says, no, man has this potential.
And Gurdjieff does the same thing here in The Tales–man has this potential and the
angelic sources, the powers above see order in the celestial sense–order is ultimately the
important thing, to make sure that disorder does not break out in the lower worlds. As a
prehension, as a seeing ahead into the future, that puts into motion certain mechanical-
nesses that imprison man is what Beelzebub objects to and says that this is a nearly “criminal
unforeseeingness.”7 And he puts this right at the door of the angel Looisos and the High
Commission, which includes Archangels as well.
Participant: I hope this is not taken facetiously, but when you are talking about the story
of man and his potential, it occurred to me that we are in the midst of this election where
there is a struggle between people seeing that Donald Trump can bring the potential of the
country out, that he has a potential but, in his appearance, it is not seen or at least many
people are not seeing that he is bringing potential to the future of the country as opposed
to the other candidate that is going to bring the same thing, the familiar, the safe, the con-
vention. Maybe you don’t see that but it seems to me that it is a part of the story and what
is going on in the election right now. We are in the midst of that myth.

7 G.I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales, p 673

11
Keith: Well, we are in the midst of ordinary life. All of that on both sides is ordinary life.
It is all crazy–in the Work sense. This is all second state of consciousness. There is not one
shred of entry into the third state of consciousness, this attention to what is really going on.
There is not a shred of that–anywhere! That’s the world that we live in; that’s the world
that, unfortunately, we function in.
I hope we can go into this more this weekend —what do we do about Work in the
individual and in the group sense, given the state of the world?
This has been a question for-ever. Gurdjieff lived through the occupation in Paris.
You have to keep in mind this extraordinary human being had the capacity to do things
in the midst of that awful situation.
We are certainly called upon to be more conscious than we find ourselves when we
wake up in the morning. The demands on us personally and in groups are far beyond
anything that is out there–far beyond.
So what is happening in the election is all just crazy stuff, second state of consciousness
stuff–all reactive stuff. There is no reason in it or reasons for it. Yes, there are laws that are
being followed because nothing can be unlawful, that doesn’t mean that the laws that are
being followed are very inclusive laws or high laws.
For instance, laws, which are in us because of our digestion of food, lead us to defend
the body, to hold the body as one. All of that energy and all of that DNA transmission
into impulses and whatnot doesn’t give a damn about its own children, certainly not his
neighbors. It can’t. It doesn’t have the consciousness to do that. To the degree that it is
open and it can stay open, that means an escape into whatever the mentation is that locks us
in that first state. I think that is an adequate definition of the second state of consciousness.
The second state of consciousness does not permit the attention to be in the world of self-
other. I am not referring to a moment, a moment of empathy–no, not that–I mean to live
in that world. It is a very tough world to live in. I think Gurdjieff lived in that world all of
time. He said his life was against his essence. When he left Russia, he left his essence. He
lived a life that was inimical to his essence. But he lived it because he understood from
Higher Emotional and Higher Intellectual Center that that was necessary.
It is just as necessary for us.
Participant: It is the story of Beelzebub being exiled.
Keith: Yes, exactly.

12
October Gathering 2016 ~ Friday Morning, first session

Reading from “Form and Sequence”

“When at the beginning of our journey I noticed that you were very
interested in the three-brained beings of the planet Earth, I then decided,
under the aspect of gratifying that interest of yours, to tell you everything
about them in such a way so that there should be crystallized in you for
your future being-associations the required what are called ‘Egoplastikoori’,
without any admixture of doubt.
“For this, I have in almost all my tales strictly held to the two following
principles:
“The first: not to say anything as if it were my own personal opinion, in
order that data necessary for your own convictions should not be crystal-
lized in you in a prepared form according to the opinions of another.
“And in accordance with the second principle: to relate to you in just
such an order and in such a premeditated and selected sequence about all
the events which proceeded on this planet Earth connected with the arising
among these three-brained beings who have taken your fancy, of various
gradually progressing inner and outer abnormalities in the process of their
ordinary being-existence, the total of which has given them their present
desolate and almost inescapable state–in order that you should be able to
marshal your own subjective reasoning concerning all causes, only on the
basis of certain facts which I have told you.
“I decided to do this in order that many diversely essenced ’Egoplasti-
kooris’ for your future logical confrontation should be crystallized in cor-
responding localizations in your common presence, and also in order that
from active mentation the proper elaboration in you of the sacred sub-
stances of Abrustdonis and Helkdonis for the purpose of coating and per-
fecting both of your higher being-parts should proceed more intensively.1
Participant: My relationship to the book seems to be constantly changing. It’s a real
mystery to me how I can pick that book up, read a portion of it and I may come back to
that again at a later date and it’s like I never read it before. There is always a new aspect of
it for me. A majority of it I do not understand at all. It’s only when I am with a group like
this who has a sincere desire to plumb some deeper knowledge, a deeper understanding of
it, that I begin to have an opening, a small one that I might understand a little more about
it. It’s not overwhelming but it feels like I will spend the rest of my life trying to understand
what is there for me. With everyone else’s help, it feel like there will be some result.
Keith: To continue the story a little bit further because there also comes this point in The
Tales where Hassein suddenly has his own experience, when he does see and he does dedi-
cate himself in a certain direction. That is also something I would like to get impressions
about. What is Gurdjieff trying to give us picture of here when Hassein makes this commit-
ment on his own part? What does this mean?

1 G.I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales, pp 1165-1166

13
Participant: I hold this picture of Joseph Campbell relative to myth and I see Beelzebub
as that. It is a mythical piece of work not only to serve us but to serve our times in the
way that Campbell talks about the power and the purposive of myth. Particularly, where
he mentions in our time today, we don’t have a myth and the consequences of that. But
Campbell says that there are four purposes to myth: to reconcile us to life and I think of
the Trogoautoegocrat, I eat because I am eaten, that relentless nature of this-is-how-
things-are and I think of his admonition to read it three times. The first reading is kind
of that reconciliation–this is the way we are, this is the way our inner world is and to
reconcile ourselves to that.
The second and the third [purposes of myth] Campbell illustrates are the social. I often
think of that in terms of group work or working with others. And then there is the personal
which he refers to as the ethical.
And then there is the pedagogical, the fourth is educational that can draw something
out of me–the meaning of education is to “draw out.” There can be my experiencing if
there is a resonance between the stories that Beelzebub is articulating to his grandson.
If there is an experience within me that can resonate with that, it draws something out
of me in that moment then I can track that; I have the possibility to plumb the depths of
that more to whatever degree is possible given the attention I can hold. The story grows
or takes on greater meaning or greater understanding so I oftentimes hold that when I
think of Beelzebub and The Tales.
Keith: Anybody have any impressions: why the grandson?
Here is this young being and his father and his uncle are already accomplished beings–
one returning to Karatas to eventually become the chief mentor for the whole of Karatas and
the other goes to Purgatory to become the organizer of all information that flows in from all
over the Universe and he becomes the chief of the communications center.
And here is the grandson, so how does that strike you?
It is an interesting circumstance when I think of it because I treasure my two grand-
fathers. It was unfortunate that both of my grandmothers died before I was born but I had
a very close relationship, especially with one grandfather, but I had a good relationship with
the other as well. There are so many things, as I grow older, I remember that I learned from
them; if not from what they said but from how they were, the kind of human beings they
appeared to me to be, what they brought into my world.
So I wondered about that because my father is my father and he was an extraordinary
important person in my life but how do I put my father in the position of going back to
Karatas or serving on Purgatory, but it is my grandfather who is my teacher. As a grand-
son, how do I experience that? How do you take that when you are reading The Tales
and then you suddenly realize that Hassein has something to do with me then how do
I see myself in context of the grandfather?
Participant: I’ve always taken it personally, that I do have a connection with Gurdjieff.
I didn’t meet him, he is my grandfather kind of thing where he’s telling something to the
future people in the Work who might not have actually got to meet him. I can sense that
his Reason is higher than mine. When I am reading The Tales, it almost always influences
me in that way where Gurdjieff’s Reason power affects me as I am receptive to it and a
new level arises in me that allows me to act.

14
Participant: It seems to me that there is the potential for greater objectivity between a
grandfather and a grandson. There isn’t that conflict of power or intimidation that can go
with the father. For the grandfather, it is much more relaxed. It’s not my kid; my parenting
isn’t the issue in an ordinary sense.
I think about the people who were close enough to be Gurdjieff’s pupils and what a
mixed blessing that was. I don’t have the sense of obligation to be like him; I didn’t have
him as a direct model or to transmit what he gave me exactly as he gave it to me because
he didn’t give it to me. So in a way, I think the burden for the first generation is different.
They couldn’t be as objective. And since Gurdjieff says that the Work must change to live
and not become repetitive or mechanical or parroting, because we didn’t have direct con-
tact with him, inevitably, it’s going to come through us differently. There is a potential for
more freedom, for a different kind of expression in later generations because we don’t
have that burden that it can actually be a part of our lives. So there is the danger of more
and more wiseacring but there is also the possibility, for those whom the Work comes alive
inside, to pass it on in variations that might be more appropriate to the changing times.
Keith: These are very good points.
Participant: There is something about how one’s parents, they educate one’s personality
but there is a vision of people who are closer to death. It has always struck me that it the
Chinese grandparents that raise the children. When you started to speak about it, it stuck
me there is a direct connection of older people with something more essential. Like that part
of me, there are essential parts of me that bypass personality. I never had grandparents but
it always touched me when people almost universally speak about having grandchildren or
having grandparents in a very certain way as you did this morning.
Participant: This kind of echoes what people have said but for me it is like Gurdjieff
speaking to our Higher Emotional Center in the sense that parents stimulate one’s reactive
nature, like the body and feeling and thoughts, but with my grandfather, I feel I could be
able to hear him from Higher Emotional Center. When I first picked up Beelzebub’s Tales
and read it, I felt Gurdjieff was speaking to part of me which has rarely ever been communi-
cated to in my life and that was what came alive for me, which had been pretty much ignored
apart from having grandparents growing up but that part had never been communicated to
explicitly through language.
Keith: This strikes a real chord with me. I wondered often why I have this feeling that
joined Beelzebub’s Tales with one of my grandfathers, for no reason in ordinary life. My
grandfather was a hard-shelled Baptist, very quiet, a hard worker, a carpenter but he was
gentle with me, always and his correction was almost always indirect. He never spoke like
my Father did. The immediate parents are corrective through the personality most often,
through what we do and what we say… “Don’t say this and do that.” My grandfather was
never like this. I’ve tried a few times to find out why do I have this feeling and you just
articulated it very well that there is something in the essence of my grandfather that reso-
nated with Beelzebub, with that perspective of Beelzebub. But I never figured it out logi-
cally; I never saw that so that was a help.
Participant: My father had a very stressful childhood with his siblings. His father was
a strong German. And I certainly have my memory with my Dad and how that evolved and

15
my own patterns pertaining to my father. But I witnessed his interaction with my two nieces
and I could see that he was given a second chance. [With me], he was operating under the
Reason-of-knowing, what he knew, the education that his father passed down to him and it
wasn’t education, it was very limited, he just didn’t have the tools. By the time he got to
my nieces, it gave him a second chance. Life had changed for him; his emotions had settled,
there was more of a feeling. I was just with my two nieces and the memories they have of my
father are very heartfelt. And the stories I hear about Mr. Gurdjieff, that the methodology
changed as he got older and, as the groups changed, so did the interaction. At the Prieuré
there was more shock and driving and when that period ended, it seemed like he had a
more being quality. That’s being simplistic but they did change.
Participant: Yes this is very helpful, especially about the essence of the child. Another
aspect also is that Beelzebub invites Hassein to ask him questions; he helps his questions
evolve to the point where Hassein has something of his own. I feel reading The Tales that
when I don’t understand, that if I continue to ask and to persevere, that more will be given.
For example, I’ve always wondered, why does he say to Hassein, in the chapter “Form
and Sequence,” he will not give Hassein his opinions but the preceding chapters are all
‘opinion’ chapters (“…Beelzebub’s Opinion of War” “In the opinion of Beelzebub, Man’s
Understanding of Justice…” “In the Opinion of Beelzebub, Man’s Extraction of Elec-
tricity…”)? One thing I had never noticed was that he said, “… not to say anything as if it
were my own personal opinion...” 2
To me, that is an acknowledgment that, indeed, all these things he has given to Hassein
are his opinions but he has presented them in a way that Hassein can form his own opinion.
This question I have been carrying has now been expanded.
Keith: This is a great parallel to an experience we had with Mrs. Popoff. In the early time
with Mrs. P, she was very careful whenever she started speaking about something that she
qualified what she said. She said, “in my opinion” and she would say what she was going to
say. So everybody, as is perfectly normal, began to imitate her. When they were asked to
report on something or share an impression, they would say, “in my opinion.” And this went
on for some period of time. And then she blew up on this one occasion, “Of course, it’s your
opinion, who’s else is it going to be???” And then she just gave us this opportunity to see, of
course, it is our opinion; it is her opinion also. So why did you take it from me and just prattle
on and imitate? It is like that. Suddenly you realize this is Gurdjieff’s opinion all the time;
this is not playing games, this is the real stuff.
However, along with that he says, you have to test it for yourself. This is the other side
of the coin. Being human beings, as soon as we open our mouth, we are giving an opinion.
We can’t say anything without having to frame it in some way or other and that’s going to
be always framed as my opinion, that is how I enter this event so, of course we have recog-
nize that but also we have to digest that and come to our own opinion as he admonishes his
grandson to do, to come to his own opinion of these circumstances. But that was Mrs. P’s
approach to giving us a very strong lesson.
Participant: I have a daughter and a grandson and we haven’t been very close as she lives
a distance away. I want to make an effort with my grandson as Beelzebub did.
[a fair amount of skipping in this part of the recording]

2 Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales, p 1165

16
Keith: That you are trying to address that question, I think that’s the essential part.
It is there to be healed and that’s the challenge.
Participant: Gurdjieff’s respect for the good customs. Today we see there are many
cultures with a council of elders.
Keith: Gurdjieff was complementary of customs and the specific customs he makes
mention of. How do you understand the word “Egoplastikoori?”
Participant: That is his being-efforts.
Keith: Any other impressions of Egoplastikoori? After all, this is a three-brained event;
Beelzebub says I want you to do the work of understanding not to have it pre-packaged.
Participant: From Beelzebub’s Tales:
“I decided to do this in order that many diversely essenced ‘Egoplas-
tikooris’ for your future logical confrontation should be crystallized in corre-
sponding localizations in your common presence, and also in order that from
active mentation the proper elaboration in you of the sacred substances of
Abrustdonis and Helkdonis for the purpose of coating and perfecting both
of your higher being-parts should proceed more intensively.3
On page 331 he defines ‘being-ego-plastikuri’ as ‘psychic-picturings.’
Keith: In their construction they have to have the ‘elementalness’ from which Helkdonis
and Abrustdonis can be extracted. All I am saying is that it can’t be a story about a snowstorm
or what the weather is today, that’s not what he is talking about. He is talking about some-
thing in the story that is gained in the arena of higher emotion, to be extracted from this and
digested from it.
And the same with Helkdonis–something that can be seen, understood, something that
can be taken from this that it is a model of, if you will, that you can learn from and this will
increase your Reason. So there are both of those features that have to be put into it to begin
with. In other words, they have to be part of the Egoplastikooris, part of the shaping of this.
Participant: When a moment occurs to me when there seems to be a flash of understanding,
I’ve come to be able to distinguish between an intellectual association, something I’ve read
or heard from the association to actual prescient experience in the past. So there is then the
remembrance or in a way reliving of the sensation, feeling, thinking something real. I’ve
come to understand, for me, that those experiences resonate in three places because what
is happening inside is some kind of representation of that.
Keith: True, right.
Participant: Then there is real understanding, understanding what it tastes like, feels like;
it’s not a thought, it’s a connection between real events, real experiences.
Keith: It just occurred to me one of the building blocks, if you will, or the background for
the Egoplastikoori; we could take the descents. Take the first descent and the story about
young kinsman and all the difficulties and the final resolution. That’s a story. What can be

3 Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales, p 1165

17
extracted from that, we could ask ourselves, that is of the nature of Abrustdonis? We could
talk about that quite a bit.
And then, Helkdonis. What do we learn from it; that this is the way the world is; this is
the way the world has to be put back together again or however we see that. But then we can
go to the second descent and now we have his interaction with this poor priest and what a
picture that is, what a marvelous Egoplastikoori that has so many dimensions that are highly
emotional, highly physical and also involve an understanding or lack of understanding or
limited understanding in all the implications that the story line carries that certainly from
which could be extracted Abrustdonis and Helkdonis, a degree of emotional understanding
of higher emotion and of higher intellect.
Participant: There is a quality of “been there, done that.”
Keith: There is also that, yes, exactly.
Participant: Yes, I see the young kinsman; I’ve been in that situation; I’ve been in that
situation–the apes, yes. So all of those resonate–oh, that’s about me.
Keith: Right, that is the point I was aiming for, that each of these Egoplastikooris is a story,
but he chooses elements and he puts that story together in such a way that there is a real
treasure here of Higher Emotional sort and Higher Reason and it is up to us to extract it, to
see far enough into that–to suddenly see, yes, this is what he is talking about, this is in my
life too, as you point out, we have all been there. We have lived through it, “oh, boy, I re-
member that; in fact I fell into it yesterday again.”
Participant: Many years ago sharing an experience at a meeting of relating how I reacted
to much of the literal baggage that my wife had from her travels in Japan. Where we were
living, we always had to move it around; it was in the way. One time, just throwing something
to the point where I broke something that had great significance for her. I remember relating
that event at a meeting and you turned and you said, “now you must always work with that.”
Over the years, any time I now pick something up that is hers, there is that remembrance
and there is that moment of opportunity; something is there to treat that object, piece of
clothing, whatever it may be, shoes, something that is laying around, it’s been there all that
time. Each moment, there is something that can be stretched further.
So when I think of Egoplastikooris, it molded into something over the years within me
that created that kind of thread through time. It is a real blessing.
Keith: Yes. This tells us something very important and you can continue to elaborate on that
about the nature of Abrustdonis in this case. It is not a one-time thing. It is something that
goes into the essence. It then with us forever, it becomes our possession because we have
understood something; it is not knowing, it is understanding something. So, go on.
Participant: Yes and in that moment there is just that gift of the opportunity to stretch a
little further into the emotional connection, to be present with that in that space. It resonates
with the time you also, years ago, recommended going to Al-Anon. I remember sharing some
experiences at Al-Anon the difficulties I had with my father’s alcoholism and I’ll never forget
the moment when one of the women in the group said well it’s kind of like where you don’t
reach a point where you reconcile to–every moment that you have to wake up to that addic-
tion or that space that you are in. In that moment, there is a real emotional response and
new possibilities that could happen in my next step and it’s not a given; it doesn’t become

18
mechanical but now into kind of like the emotional experience is there that I have an
opportunity to think deeper into what I do with that and what I project into her life.
Keith: So that the Abrustdonis begins to feed Helkdonis, into the higher intellect as well.
Participant: I’d like to offer three examples of humor, thinking about how Beelzebub is
training Hassein. My grandfather was Irish and the Irish have a gift. Something that stuck
with me is his delivery of things that he would say.
He said to me, “What do you think you want to do for a living?” and I said I wanted to
be a musician. He said, “I don’t think you have what it takes.” On the substance and content
you would get one meaning but his expression was wry. And so the effect was a paradox;
I had to internalize and ponder the question.
The second example is of this guy, a man, who was responsible for the careers of
hundreds and hundreds of people and he had a thing that he said to people. And he had
a thing that he said to people. He would say, “It’s my opinion and it should be yours.” And
you notice that people laugh when you say that which shows that humor is paradoxical.
What is the conflict in there that creates that laughing and what is the inherent truth?
Cognitive dissonance is another name for it. He is saying you are entitled to your own
opinion but it should be the same as mine, so it’s not really your own. It’s funny because the
ridiculousness of that position to be in is close to the truth that we are gullible. And he sets
up a confrontation that then sits inside.
The third example is in The Tales, where, time after time, Beelzebub has an expression
that Hassein can’t figure out; we never exactly figure out what it means. And sometimes
this is followed by something Gurdjieff wants to emphasize. This kind of humor appears
throughout The Tales. And I would take that also as the hypnotic effect of double messages
that Milton Ericson identified. For example, Ericson watched his family say one thing and
expressing another with their body, which sets up cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance
using, not in this case humor necessarily but possibly conflict; the reaction is anger but the
effect is similar to that of humor. The former retains the charge and the latter dissipates it.

19
October Gathering 2016 ~ Friday Morning, second session

Keith: If we accept the notion that Gurdjieff is speaking individually to the reader of The
Tales and that in one way or another we can understand ourselves as sitting in the place of
Hassein, in the end, we are left with however we understand the message. I think it would
be worthwhile if we try to explore what is the meaning of that message into my own life.
How do I understand what I am obligated toward, now?
I think all of us have a tendency, a perfectly human tendency, to simply assume that
however this is going–it is just going to continue. But we live in very, very interesting times,
very difficult times and unpredictable times. And the question of what our own personal
obligation is–is one that increasingly, it seems obvious especially to people in Work what is
my obligation toward this. Here I am and at whatever age I am (I am about to be in a month
84 years old) so what am I obligated toward with whatever time I have left?
If I am an incipient grandson, what does that obligate me toward, individually?
I think it would be worthwhile sharing some impressions about how does that strike you.
How does this opportunity for Abrustdonis, Helkdonis–how does that travel inside of you?
Participant: For practical purposes I ask myself, from the Work point of view, “What can
I do.” Do I want to spread the message of the Work? Is it my interaction with people? We
talk about self-remembering and self-observation it is a very big part of the Work, and
self-remembering is the most practical part. I think you can try and make a difference with
interactions with other people in our daily activities. I don’t know whether we could change
anything practically except by maybe just being present and somehow connect as a vehicle
for the Work impulses. (Quiet)
Keith: Is this quiet because everybody is seriously considering or is everybody hiding?
(Laughter)
Participant: I want to stop war. And I am embarrassed to say that now that I am 55 but
I would rather be embarrassed because I won’t give up. I am happily embarrassed by ad-
mitting to people that I don’t believe it’s possible anymore but I still believe that I have
to try. And I don’t mean with myself, stopping war within myself. That is so much easier
than stopping war on the whole planet.
And I admire Gurdjieff the more I read and understand his writings because he, at some
point, says that I am going to make it my aim to figure out the suggestibility problem. And
because people are under suggestibility they go to war more easily. If they could become free
of that they would be able to choose something different. And so I sit here when you ask that
and I can’t really say anything because there is nothing I can do except little things–I can do
little things, like smile at a child when they come up after a performance. That’s a very small
thing and I try to do this with small things. I remember the whole as best I can, including my
inner world in which I have to stop war also.
So it is hard to respond and it is hard to do enough. I can’t do anything very big–not big
enough for my aspirations, what I feel called to do. So, I sit here quietly wondering what
little thing I could do–rather that speak up, like I just did.
Participant: This is a very, very big and vital question that has moved me for many, many
years to try to reconceive the basis of international relations and how each of us as individu-
als can try better to build earth community, as I call it now. It also led me to look into the
Baha’i world community, which seems to offer a revelatory basis and a new covenant for the

20
establishment of a non-competitive method of self-government that will help in the elimina-
tion of conflict and not pitting people against each other.
It seems to me that each of us should wonder with all the energy and sense of transfor-
mation in the world whether there is not a great spiritual force behind this, a great intel-
ligence that is cleansing the human community and leading us toward the promises that
religions have always given us–that a day will come that we will live in peace.
Participant: Perhaps this is idealistic or naive or both but when reading this I walked away
with understanding, the personal understanding that Abrustdonis is service and Helkdonis is
understanding. I believe and it has always been my belief that the work itself is like a world
or a cosmos and that may not be the right word for it but it has a force of its own. If you are
a small person, retired or without world connections or whatever, it seems to me that what
we can do is serve the Work. And I suppose that there is the prayer that that’s enough.
Keith: Yes Bob.
Participant: From Beelzebub’s Tales, p 1107:

“And so, my dear Hassein, when it appeared that the instinctive need for
conscious labor and intentional suffering in order to be able to take in and
transmute in themselves the sacred substances Abrustdonis and Helkdonis
and thereby to liberate the sacred Askokin for the maintenance of the Moon
and Anulios had finally disappeared from the psyche of your favorites, then
Great Nature Herself was constrained to adapt Herself to extract this sacred
substance by other means, one of which is precisely that periodic terrifying
process there of reciprocal destruction.
So in answer to Steffan, war on this planet may not be just between us. Great Nature is
requiring it if we don’t work. So what you can do is to liberate these substances. [Abrust-
donis and Helkdonis]
Participant: You know sometimes we can’t avoid war. I haven’t but maybe someone here
has been in the services, I don’t know. But if you are in the Work and you find yourself get-
ting drafted and involved in war and you can’t avoid it, you have to make the best of it. I
am reminded of the story in Our Life with Mr. Gurdjieff by Thomas de Hartmann’s where
he was in the same situation. He [de Hartmann] was called to duty and he had to go and
couldn’t avoid it. And Gurdjieff said that if you can’t avoid it you have to go but this is what
you do. In moments of danger, like being shot at, try to be present to your breath most of
the time. At least once, I think, that did save his life, maybe a couple of times. So he couldn’t
avoid going to war but he brought the Work with him to the battle field by being present to
the breath. It may have saved his life. And maybe in other ways we don’t know it may have
saved other people’s lives. We all have dreams of stopping war but it is beyond our control
whether there is war or not. You can send energies out into the world and make a difference
in the long run. But from a practical point of view bring what you can from the Work into
life. And if you have to go to war bring it to war too.
Participant: I think we are touching on something that strikes me as true in that I have
had the experience in my life of someone who may not have been in the Work, certainly they
weren’t, and I can’t speak as to their level of consciousness but they said or did something
that had an important effect on my life that I took in and gathered something positive from.
And when I review some of those instances I do believe that the person, in some instances,

21
was unaware of the effect. So I think that we need to keep in mind that we really don’t know
the effect of what we say and do might have on another being. We should just try to be with
that fact–we really don’t know. We have to do the best that we can in the moment to be as
forthright, sincere and conscious as we can because we don’t know just what that is going to be.
Participant: Sometimes we get a hint. I have gotten a hint in the last year or so from start-
ing to work more intensively. I notice that when I’m really working on myself that just in the
world, the place that I live, that I will go into a place once and I’ll come back and be treated
like royalty. And that’s just not one place, it is everywhere I go. And I think that’s an effect of
who I am being and I’m not intentionally trying to be regal or special, but I come back and
I’m treated well and people remember me and they respond and they change, in themselves,
and that’s not something that I would try in any way to fiddle with. It just happens that way.
I know at least for myself that there’s a tremendous potential. I feel as if I had what I call
a track to run on, I could go to Washington and within a week I could have spoken to people
in the White House and as many people as I could encounter in Congress or wherever else
because I have done that kind of thing before with people of high status. That is something
that I kind of discovered it’s just a matter of you don’t hold yourself back, thinking you can’t
do that … and these people are approachable … they want information, they want wisdom.
There was somebody, I think it was George Soros who had all this money and he wanted
to become a philanthropist, he turned, I think, to the Gates. Instead of him knowing in his
own conscience what the world needs, what can I do with all my billions of dollars. He had
to consult with somebody. And I’m sure in this room that people here are far clearer about
where to apply the influence of wealth. I struggle with this question because I’m the kind of
person who has the Hamlet syndrome.
I grew up in such comfort that my issue is not so much to be or not to be, it’s to do or
not to do. And in my life I have turned down an awful lot of things that I should have done.
I should have made the extra effort but I rested back in the comfort of what was given to
me in my background, the things that I know, the circumstances that I’ve been in so I didn’t
make an effort to live up to what I know that would have been my potential; to go to an Ivy
League school, I turned that down, to make a career on Wall Street, to become a doctor, a
psychiatrist, or something like that or to become an academic of some sort. I know I have
that capacity. But I rested back. I rusticated. I lived in a comfort zone. I think a lot of people
have the Hamlet syndrome. I think it is a product of growing up in America post World War
II. There are people with PhD’s who are working in supermarket checkouts, bartending but
they have a PhD in anthropology. My difficulty with this is realizing that we’ve got the poten-
tial. But my difficulty is sort of having a track to run on. It’s sort of like if I had an ideology
and was going out to convert people to something that would be quite easy.
But the Work is very different because the Work isn’t a dogma. Work is not instructing
people in setting up institutions, for instance. And so I don’t know sort of what to do with
myself. I just started to write and I figure that I can incorporate important ideas, maybe they
are higher ideas, into my writing and I am about to help somebody at set up an art gallery
and there is the possibility of having an art school and possibly of coming up with something
equivalent to what Impression was, it was a school of art, an esoteric school, the Impression-
ists, and contribute in that way. I think that stopping war would be a … I think it is possible
and I think Gurdjieff or somebody said that if there were 200 conscious people in the world
they could stop war.
Participant: You said you were turning 84 and I just turned 70. It certainly brought some
new thoughts, at least from a different perspective. And as you said that you can’t always

22
count on what has preceded that the group is always going to be here or a certain member
is always going to be here or that family members are always going to be there, and I look
at it as different degrees of reason.
And I see that if we do value, whatever each of us has put forth, that is a degree of
reason. I look at my change. Mr. Adie speaks a number of times about becoming clear and
when he speaks about that and I can put that within myself and it is fear of not embracing
the moment, that reason, age and experience are more forgiving of myself, are more in
pursuit of trying to understand others’ perspective. I am still working. I’m still plumbing,
I’m semi-retired, I have to generate an income and I have finally reached a point that I
have more time to read. And I can remember trying to generate an income and really, really
pushing my body and I pushed my body for many, many years and creating an image within
my Work, my trade. I saw that as reason at the time and now I can put that aside. You know
when I am down on the floor after doing my preparation and I am doing my stretching
exercises and Cindy might be up and I can’t always count that she will be coming down the
steps, but someday that will stop. So for me the most meaningful thing is different degrees
of reason. I can say that that’s the most objective appreciation that I can say that I have
really received.
The fact is that I can speak about that and go beyond my self-centeredness. That degree
of reason is what enables me to be in the moment and to see other and as you were speak-
ing this morning how tell a story and be inclusive, how to, if you are with your family, how to
make it more meaningful–that it’s not how it has always been, that somehow you’re creating
new members. And that’s my gratitude to the Work. It is never-ending. It is still fresh. I’m
still seeing new insights. And that is why I said something about fear. I am so grateful that I
see that fear within myself. And that fear is what prevents me from embracing the moment.
Embracing the moment is being in the Now.
Participant: What you say George and the reference to the 200 conscious people, and
the quote that was re-read about Great Nature adapting herself–this all seems to be what
we are looking for. In answering your question Keith, I think that this is the separation of
Abrustdonis and maybe some Helkdonis.
Keith: There’s an individual, Jan Jarvis, most of you know Jan and she will be with us tonight
hopefully. She had other obligations that delayed her ability to get here. But, in correspon-
dence with Jan she has highlighted two issues that I think are very much related to the ques-
tion that we have in front of us now. The question [topic] is this. I’ll try to put it in her terms.
If one is in this Work to form, to coat a Kesdjan Body and that is your aim, then you are not
in this Work. You are on an egoistic self-pursuit to coat your body–with a Kesdjan Body that
will survive, if that’s where it ends. So if that is your aim to coat a Kesdjan Body in those
terms; that that is your fundamental primary aim then you have an influence that’s yours.
On the other side is working in a group and that group has a corporate1 aim and that serving
the group relative to some aim that that is a more appropriate aim. That’s a question that Jan
has as I understand it.
But it seems to me that it is obvious, Gurdjieff speaks a great deal in The Tales about the
coating of Kesdjan, but as we explored last year at this gathering to some extent, the coating of
Kesdjan has a certain fundamental requirement. We cannot enter in any way, shape or form to
a pursuit of Kesdjan unless we enter a world of self-other. This is the absolute requirement.

1 Corporate in the sense of pertaining to a united group, as of persons: the corporate good: united or combined
into one.

23
 In terms of the three-food enneagram, this is the passage from mi of Air, in which we are
still locked into the mechanicalness of all of our inner relationships between the brains–in
which all of our emotion or feeling world is still focused and centered on the self. To enter
the world of self-other is only possible with the use, as Mr. Adie pointed out and will be
pointed out in other readings that we will be doing, requires the attention. And the attention
cannot ever be directed solely toward my future, my salvation, my coating of Kesdjan. But it
has always to be seen, understood and lived in the context of self-other.
So we are in this together. We are always self-other; whether we are alone brushing our
teeth in the morning or whether we are involved in a large group activity or if we are going to
a group meeting or we are pursuing life as George does, I think so meaningfully. He pursues
Work while he is plumbing. He takes self-other into that world so that he is, in his concerns
of the people he is working for–he is living in that world. He is in that world of self-other.
That’s the requirement; the basil entry point. If we do not have that, then it is all egoism, it
is all self-feeling to try to gain something for myself.
Participant: There’s a contradiction I am hearing. Jan is saying it’s egoistic to create a
Kesdjan Body, but this whole idea of Kesdjan involves other people like you were talking
about George and I don’t get the major contradiction of what you are talking about because
when I am in my own little world of my physical existence and my survival, that is where
my egoism is. It’s dissolving as I am entering a relationship with others and responding and
perceiving them finally. So that’s a process away from egoism. So I don’t see how egoistic
and Kesdjan relate and those thoughts were in my mind.
Keith: I totally agree. It is a contradiction in terms. But I think what Jan was trying to point
out and I think this comes up occasionally in our own group work, when you can see that
someone, an individual, perhaps yourself, that you are pursuing a particular aim, say with a
particular exercise and so forth, from a very selfish perspective, that we are doing something
for ourselves, hoping to gain something for ourselves, hoping to enlarge my consciousness or
whatever, and it has so much to do with the attention that is focused that way. Then we have
not brought the attention, the hydrogen 12 energies, down from 8 on the enneagram.

An Evolutional Octave
DO
Intentionally- 9/0
actualized-Mdnel-In

(321) SI 8 1 RE (123)
Freedom, Growth,
Function Function Expansion,
Compassion,
sensory motor Creation
Help
Being

LA 7 (312) 2 MI (132)

Pattern, Function Will Function Interaction,

Order, motor sensory Connectivity
Result, Law Being Being

6 Function Function 3
Disharmonized Entry from
Fifth sensory motor Outside
Harnel-Aoot Mechano-
Process of coinciding-
Transformation
Transformation Mdnel-In
5 4
Concentration, Evolution, SOL (213) FA (231) Identity, Independence,
Transformation, Striving Self-hood

24
 It should come 8 to 5. In coming from 8 to 5, in bringing attention from the 3 twelves
that exist at that level, bringing what attention that we can to the point of incoming im-
pressions at 5, coming down in that direction, then this is the requirement. You see, if it is
for myself all the energy of attention ends up in the self. It doesn’t open to other, include
other. It seems to me that there is a danger and I certainly agree with Larry that there is
this contradiction in how Jan put that. Still and all we all can fall prey to this–that we are
doing something for ourselves and we do not have our participation as a human being with
all other in that equation. I think that’s true. It’s certainly true in my own world that there
are times when I see what I have been up to, what that ‘I’ has been up to, and that it is
serving itself, it is not serving the self-other world.
Participant: This relates to something that my wife Judith, bless her soul, grew up within
that notion of heaven and hell. To paraphrase what she says that all these people were work-
ing to save their ass from going to hell. That disturbed her because all those “good works”
were fading and possibly were grasping at self-aggrandizement.
Participant: For me the principle or the path to self-perfection, one’s motivation to do that
is something that everyone has to decide for themselves. But ultimately when Gurdjieff talks
about help for endlessness and that we, in gratitude, will maintain all that God has created,
we have the responsibility to maintain what the creator has created for us. And we can only
do that, we can only serve him when we have the reciprocal process with him where we have
to strive to work on ourselves to be able to be of service to him and to the creation. So, I
think if we don’t wish to serve him and our own work is based around that wish, you know
other things can happen. But the motivation, whether religious motivation or conscience or
whatever longing one has to serve the creator and Gurdjieff is pretty clear about that in
The Tales when he presents this to endlessness about the relationship we have with our
father and if that underpins our Work on ourselves, it is more likely that we will be safe and
that for me is the only way to steer clear of that motivation.
Keith: But I think one of the points about Jan’s perspective on this, and I am sure she will
be willing to share her perspective when she gets here, but she is right, majorly right in this
sense, the world out there today, the world that we all come from and go back into, and that
many of us still have jobs inside of and the work that we do, is not at all like we have been
talking about.
At every turn out there, everything is so organized that it is our profit, it is our getting
ahead, it is making more, it is winning the race, it is all of this. It seems to me that there is
very, very little in the world out there and I think you all have a clear notion of what is meant
by out there, in the world of politics and economics, that most of that has to travel through
or have some relationship to everyday. Just turn on the television, or live through the political
season of hates and threats and that’s all out there. It’s very real, very powerful. It inevitably
gets inside each of us. There is no way to stay pristine pure about what is going on out there.
We can’t get up in the morning before it assaults us one way or another and I think part of
what Jan was referring to is that if we feel we are privileged and inside something that re-
ally has nothing to do with that world out there, just pursuing this in here, that’s a mistake.
Because we are part of that world and we interact and interface with that world every day.
How do we do that? And this is my point about self-other. If our interaction with the world
out there with individual people is not open to including other in this pursuit, whatever it is

25
that we share in that moment, then we can’t legitimately claim that we are engaged in an
activity that is inclusive of others.
Participant: For me, the Work would include the other and it is partly because I wish to
see through the illusion of self. I actually want that practice to keep going in me, of seeing
through the images created in the three brains of this imaginary self, which is highlighted
by the survival triads. The imaginary self isn’t the will to be, but it is at the center point of
each of the survival triads. In all three of the survival triads is the self that is surviving. And
when I include other, that defense mechanism that wants to be at one of the survival points–
dissolves, a little bit at a time; and a new image is created in me, one that is quite reversed
in the survival, quite reversed.
Survival of Sense-of-I

+
Third
Brain

Will-to-Be

+
_ _
Survival of individual Survival of knowledge,
creations (art, science, patterns of observations
religion, philosophy) (lanquage, mathematics,
art forms, physical skills)
Survival of Sense-of-self

+
Second
Brain
Will-to-Be
attention

+
_ _
Preservation Self – Family
of the group interactions
(species)
absence of ‘individual tension’

Survival in the Moment

+
First
Will-to-Be Brain
+
_ _
attention

Future Survival Daily Survival

(reproduction) (food) to support
continuance
absence of ‘individual tension’

Keith: Quite reversed. Yes. My whole work now and I no longer have a private practice
but I am still engaged in the nursing home where there are roughly 70-75 people that I am
responsible for. Of those 70-75 people, easily 60% of them are demented individuals. They

26
don’t know what today is really and often they don’t even know what time it is. Sometimes
they don’t know who they are but almost all of them have very strong opinions about one
thing or another. This is my world. You go into this world and here are all of these people
who are demented and I go down to visit them and they start telling me about what Uncle
Fred is doing to the property and how he has wasted all her money and here is this 92 year
old woman and she’s chasing every male in the facility. At the age of 92 she has still got this
thing about men. And so when she has a chance she’ll go over snuggle into bed with a man.
Now this is her world. How to be in that world with that person, how to take her humanness
into consideration, how are we called upon to be with respect to this 92-year old demented
individual? In a sense, I take that as how to make an effort to be with each of the nurse’s
aides, with each of the nurses that care for these individuals and they do a great job. They
are so patient and understanding of the circumstance of life in a dementia community. And
they are very forgiving and accepting and very adroit, very able to move around the overt
manifestation of the dementia in such a way that peace reins most of the time. And that it
doesn’t break out into warfare, which it so easily could if these people had their way and their
adventures. If their behavior was truly followed through on the basis of what they are talking
about, because they can be very verbally and accusatory, they can be very violent, abusive
and suspicious and whatever you do don’t get talking about politics in the last six or seven
months especially, because whatever connection they have, and most of them have almost no
connection, but they still have a connection and they are influenced by the anger, the dismis-
siveness, by the hatred that is projected out there. I see this in the world of these people that
they are really powerless because it gets in there and they have absolutely no way of making
sense out of it. So they have to incorporate it in their world. They invent endless, endless
circumstances to explain what is going on in their world.
Participant: Is that a kind of Solioonensius in their world?
Keith: Sure it’s bound to be. It introduces a great tension and they have to resolve it some-
how or other. They do it with the remarkably limited reason that they have. They project
in terms of their own past. And elementally, one of the things that seems so clear, about I
would say the majority of these demented individuals, is that I see their essence and their
fundamental personality so clearly much of the time because a lot of the stuff that all of
us accumulate in our world that we hide behind, in terms of the way we meet life; that is
all gone for them. They don’t have that as a resource so like I said about this 92 year old
lady that’s always trying to climb in bed with any male who happens to be there, that is a
very, very elemental feature of essence. That’s the way she is. I talked with her and her two
daughters and they just laughed and said that mom has always been like that. She’s always
been after the men. So I think this is confirmation that we always see the elemental features
of essence, of fundamental personality that suddenly burst to the forefront in the dementia
patient, because there is so little else to take up any kind of push toward manifestation.
The only push toward manifestation is what’s there. It is very elemental. They will show
the elementalness and override it with all this dementia related stuff. Like, “Fred where
have you been it’s been so long” and she is trying to crawl into bed with him. It’s not Fred,
so there’s this marvelous ability to invent around the dementia but it’s forcibly projecting
something very fundamental individually. I believe and I’m convinced myself that we all
do this, we all do this. And we often hide behind it; we don’t see that that’s what we’re up
to, that we have this inability to sort out.

27
 Part of what I mean when I spoke about the attention coming from the 12s [mi, sol,
si 12] down to point 5 on the enneagram is to have something specific to do with the first
conscious shock. That is the entry into the world of self-other; it is away from a world that is
governed by dementia. The world below that in our total mechanicalness, when I am sure
you have had moments when you realize what an asinine s.o.b. you are, sometimes, that you
have done, said and thought or associated pretty awful things, about people, about motiva-
tion, and so forth. I think most of us have had experiences of that kind. You suddenly see
that somewhere in you is this monster. And the dementia may allow some of that to kind of
come to the fore. Then it is what it is.
My point is that when Gurdjieff says that we have many “i’s” and that attention is the only
weapon that we have. We will hear this from Mr. Adie in one of the morning pre-parations.
When he speaks about how absolutely critical it is to see that our attention is the only thing
we do. He speaks this out when he talks about what Gurdjieff has said “man cannot do.”
But that’s not true. We have to do it. There is no choice in this; we must do. How do
we do? We do with our attention. That’s how we do–only with our attention. That’s such a
good way to put this because we, with the attention, suddenly look beyond our selves. We
are attentive to what is happening out there. We are projected into the world of self-other,
projected into it and then we have to deal with it. Well this is an aspect of Abrustdonis. This
is the world of feeling, the feeling of relationship with other. What do I make of this situa-
tion that I am now in with this person who is really ticking me off because they are swearing
about this or that? People shouldn’t do that–accusing this person of all these terrible things!
So I have inside of me this tending-to-react to that, to argue about it or whatever. So, how
do I embrace this person, this circumstance, whatever this happens to be?
This is where we get into this world of self-other, in every individual interaction that we
have with each other and with the world out there. Every one of those is a challenge rela-
tive to the attention. What am I attending to when I am listening to what someone is saying?
What am I attending to? Am I listening to them? Am I listening to me thinking about what I
am going to say to counteract what they have just said? Do I spend a lot of my time putting
together my argument which is supposed to put an end to their argument? Do I spend my
time doing that or do I sometimes, with certain kinds of people, find that we are on the de-
fensive, or the offensive? You always have to put up with this person. Think of their prejudice
in the face of attention–if I had that attitude inside of me. And if I bring attention into that
moment, you see how, for a moment at least, I can be free of that. There is no accusation
when our attention is clearly on the circumstance; when there is just attention. Then there
is no judgment, there is no defining, there is no constructing–we haven’t been inventing and
we haven’t been associating. We are simply attending. Then the attending always brings us
into relationship with what is out there.
Participant: This relates to the questions of aim, conscience and reason because, in my
experience, when it is perceived that I don’t see the person–I see my prejudice. What I
experience is my belief or my objection, particularly if there is an objection towards an
individual. I do not see that person I see my objection. After a whole lifetime of this I think
that the experience is that conscience finally, in a way, revolts, “no, this is not normal, I don’t
want to live this way.” Then I begin to see that all I am objecting to is what I will not con-
front in myself. Then reason has to come in because I have to understand. I am completely
stuck in negative emotion. It’s like I see this person and I have this belief. Then my reason
tells me, “no you do not see this person, you are seeing your thing. You wish to see them
but you also have to digest that this is in you.”

28
 To me this is where conscience and reason really come together. It isn’t something that
is unconscionable; I have to use my reason and wish and consciousness to escape from this
prison. I have to go through my own garbage heap to get there. But at the same time I also
have to remember when I am with this person that I wish to see. What I believe I am seeing
is not that, because I saw it with X and I saw it with Y and I saw it with me, so it’s not them.
So to me this is a marriage of conscience and reason.
Keith: I wish I could say I agree.
Participant: But you don’t. (Laughter)
Keith: No because what I wanted to say all the way through there is that you haven’t put
attention in a way in which we can try and approach it right out front.
If I see this in myself that wants to argue, I can get lost in my argument with myself. I am
associatively wound up inside and I am not paying attention. I am not attending. That’s what
I am saying. Gurdjieff says it in several places, he seems to say, to me, if you attend if you
really put your attention on to what is happening; for a moment at least you will be free of all
of that associative garbage in the time that you are attending you are free of it. Now if you do
that and hold to it then over time you begin to see into it. The attention begins to capture a
part of all this associative garbage. It sees that it can be free of it, deep in to moments it can
be free of it. We don’t resolve those things inside of us by arguing with that which is inside
– reconciliation begins with acceptance. I see this inside of myself with my attention and
that’s where we start from. I accept that this is in me. Okay. Where do I go from there? That’s
the question. I wonder what began it. Why should I be that way? Why do I have this kind of
suspicion with this kind of behavior? Why do I always think that because person is a male or
a female that I have this associative nonsense inside myself? We do that all of the time. You
see that I want to attend to something–I want to go on a hunt. I want to search out where
did this come from inside.
Mrs. Popoff spent quite a bit of time admonishing us because there was a very, very,
popular program called “Roots.” And she would say you must with your attention “you must
explore the roots.” And it is the attention that can do that. You can’t figure your way into this.
You can’t argue your way into this. You can’t make up reasons why you think this is important
to do. No. You must see it and go through to the roots deeper and deeper. If you do you will
come upon innocence.
This was so helpful to me when she said that. I was in a specific kind of difficulty and it
really helped. She said if you get to the roots what you are going to find is a little innocent
four year-old boy! What are you going to do with that? When this four year-old boy gets
caught up in this life circumstance and gets exposed to this kind of thing and you see that in
tracing the roots you’re reaction now and all these life circumstances is where that begins.
What do you do with that? You forgive the four-year-old child. That’s what you do. You don’t
want that poor kid to be exposed to that kind of thing. This has happened more than once
to me and it is extraordinary because it simply goes away. It’s not there any longer. The four-
year-old boy has been forgiven because he was innocent. So all the things, in my present
moment, can end up being accusatory or suspicious or whatever they’re gone because I was
the one that gave them away. It was associative. I just added on and added on. So the roots
are important you see.
Participant: It’s interesting. I take kids out and teach them tracking. If you come across
a trail and you establish the direction the animal is moving, if it’s fresh particularly, there is

29
always the admonition to not track the animal if you want to understand the animal, it’s
better to back track it. Because if you make the mistake of getting too close to it all that you
are going to do is to be tracking or seeing the tracks of its behavior of you tracking it and it’s
not going to be the animal itself. It is better to back track because then you see it more for
itself. There’s a correlation between the two.
Participant: When you were speaking about your work in the nursing home and you
mentioned conscious labor and intentional suffering and one take that I have on it is that
the intentional suffering is you have these reactions, like when Gurdjieff speaks about bear-
ing the unpleasant manifestations of others which are displeasing to ourselves, and if one
takes some of the responsibility, like you’re responsible for these people and their mani-
festations are calling their lower nature and their violent reactions, but one has to bear that
from a higher state of reason. This is a duty when you are in that position; one’s lower nature
has to bear what is needed and manifest what is needed more objectively.
Keith: This is a marvelous preparation for real life. If one can bring this attitude, which is
really an attitude of acceptance and forgiveness to this demented 92-year-old and if I sud-
denly realize that this is what happens at the bottom of absolute mechanism. The whole of
my associative inner life is all mechanism. How can it be held responsible? How can I hold
it responsible? It is simply what it is. There it is. What I can do is see it when it begins to
manifest itself and each time I try to follow its roots. Where did it come from?
Participant: For me the key to bear the unpleasant manifestations of others was to learn
to bear the unpleasant manifestations of my mechanism. It’s that simple.
Keith: Say that again would you please.
Participant: We must learn to bear the unpleasant manifestations of others, of our
attitudes towards our image of ourselves then, other people are not a problem. I don’t
want to accept my own nature because it clashes with my elevated image I have of who
I am, which is usually better than I am, which is usually better than the other person.
Participant: I would be interested to hear what Jan says when she gets here, but what
I hear when she expresses that is a sense that there is a process that is not being fulfilled
and her perception is that things get stuck at a certain level and that level has a certain
inherent egoism to it relative to people’s understanding of why they work. That’s sort of
how I understand that.
The devil’s advocate part of that for myself is, as I listen to you speak and listen to us
speak, it’s inherent in the way we express that there is an I that must be present in order
for there to be an observation of what’s coming up mechanically in myself. In order to
be separate from that, separate from what my perception is of the outside world and my
relationship with other, inherent in that is the presumption or the striving for an indepen-
dent individuality, an independent individuality that can be separate from that in the
moment. So I can go back and I can start to create, based on all my readings of Gurdjieff,
that there is no point discussing altruism with oneself until one has decided to be an out
and out egoist, that one should have one’s own I or the Master, etc.. You can build this
perspective that in the beginning is the realization that one is a machine and coming to
an aim to be independent. I think that that theme is carried throughout Beelzebub’s Tales.
Right at the outset in the “Arousing of Thought” all the way through to the quote that you

30
read earlier from the Reason-of-Understanding, when he finishes that section, he closes
that with an indication regarding the Reason-of-Understanding resulting in an independent
individuality; he opens his wish for everyone.
So it seems, regardless of what one would come to over years of effort in that direction
that there is an inherent something about that that has to be a part of this picture. There has
to be that which can be simultaneously with other because we can’t speak of self-other; we
can’t speak of it in the higher aspects that we talk about, so there seems to me to be a stage
at least at which that isn’t an appropriate perspective for one to have. So, perhaps it is a case
that, with maturity, one comes to the point where one sees there must be that that has a
limitation from that perspective. I don’t think that that can be lost or gone around because
otherwise it seems to me we end up in a somewhat Eastern Buddhist perspective that doesn’t
require the degree of self-inquiry and personal understanding because it sees all of that
as illusions that have been created as a result of the mechanicality in which everyone finds
themselves.
Keith: At the very bottom, each of us, when we try to track our biological past, certainly our
physical body and all of its organ systems as they unfold; they unfold from our DNA. There
is something in each of us relative to our DNA that is absolutely unique. On the planet Earth
there is not another human being who has exactly the same DNA as each of us.
What I am trying to refer to here at a very elemental level, which I think carries on
through the unfolding of the DNA into the life of the individual, is that there is a uniqueness
–it is there at the very, very bottom–there is something that says “I am this.”
And, it should speak for itself–it should speak very strongly for itself because that is
where we have to begin. If we have other possibilities that come from the use of attention
to explore Higher Emotional and Higher Intellectual Centers or Abrustdonis, Helkdonis
and the creation of a separate body or bodies, those are not given in the DNA of the indi-
vidual. They are not given.
You see there is something, and Gurdjieff said in a number of different contexts, that
higher beings had been on the planet Earth, truly higher beings are all the same. When we
go through the four quadrant exercise we identify those great sacred teachers of the past and
he is saying that they are all the same. Now that is a very paradoxical state; to say that the
great mythic figures of Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism are the same. To say that
is a big, big thing, to say that they are all the same. But they are different from the DNA.
I think this ties in with what Harry was saying. Our uniqueness, and we are really each
of us unique–that uniqueness is not something that we cannot escape as long as we have
a physical body. As long as we are alive in a physical sense, we are going to have a physical
body that is structured around the unfolding, elaboration and compounding of that DNA.
But there is still a uniqueness, so that each of us when we stand up and speak or manifest in
any way there is an I, there is an I that is unique. And we each need that, so eventually the
hope in coming to the being of Kesdjan and Higher-being Body, that we depart from that.
You see when we die, when Gurdjieff speaks about the first Rascooarno–he’s talking
about leaving the actual physical body and that would be an interesting exploration for us
to take here together. What does it mean when you die? What are we talking about here? If
there is such a thing as a Kesdjanian existence–what in the world does that have to do with
us? And if you are to have a Higher-being Body that is to live beyond Kesdjan, as the Kesdjan
finally dissolves, what does all that mean? What is inferred about that?

31
 But here in this context, to connect up to what Harry referred to with the coming of
Kesdjan and Higher Being-body, we are no longer at that stage; we are no longer focused or
elementally connected to the physical body. This raises so many interesting questions about,
for instance, the nature of Kesdjan.
We haven’t spoken, to any degree, about Kesdjan and what this means. Is your Kesdjan
different from my Kesdjan? If someone who has truly a developed, well-formed and ma-
tured Kesdjan, can your Kesdjan become associated with that Kesdjan? Are you both exist-
ing in the same world? If so, what world? What does that open into? What does the world
of Kesdjan open into? For me, these are really interesting questions to try and have a
look at.
But the most important one for our conversation here is to connect up with what Harry
said and that is, yes, we have a unique DNA and that uniqueness of our DNA in our physical,
bodily sense is something that we really should mark and treasure because it is unique and is
an elemental level of I. But then comes this other question of how do we leave that behind?
which is what the exploration of Kesdjan and Higher Being-body really concerns–leaving
the world of the physical body behind.
Participant: It brings up thoughts about mitochondria and that whole thing. I remember
many years ago reading Lewis Thompson’s The Lives of the Cells. He comments upon this
whole notion that we have other things in each and every cell. We have this notion that we
carry them around but really it’s them carrying us around and this whole idea of that differ-
ent other identity is really the bank; it is like the cash flow that makes all of this work possi-
ble. It is an interesting way to think also about this whole world of Kesdjan. If I was following
that analogy, I would say that our Kesdjan are all the same. And the same with what you are
talking about with the Great Traditions–they are identical. It appears in the cultures or the
times, that’s the energy flow that carries us in our journey.
Keith: I love to get into mitochondria [Keith was reminded it was time to break] so this is
good to ponder over lunch, the mitochondria now in us.
We have cellular mitochondria; they inhabit the nuclei of our cells and we have cellular
mitochondria which inhabit the cytoplasm of the cell.
The mitochondria in the cell is not the same as the mitochondria in the nucleus. In the
cell, the mitochondria come about at the moment of fertilization. When the sperm enters the
egg at the moment of fertilization, its tail falls off. In that tail is all of the male mitochondria.
No male mitochondria get into the ovum. Interesting question.
That means that all of our cellular mitochondria, yours, mine, everybody’s, is all from
the female. Big questions this raises–big questions. The cellular mitochondria are female.
Amongst other things, and in all the derivatives, the mitochondria are the energy manufac-
turers for the cell and for the whole of the body, eventually. Those mitochondria, through
the manufacture of ATP, drive the cell mechanisms of the cell and eventually the entire body.
And to consider that all of that, in the cellular sense, is all female derived just raises some
very interesting questions.
Participant: What about the nuclear?
Keith: That has to do with the replication of the entire cell because it contains the DNA
of the entire cell.
Participant: So there are still no male nuclei.

32
Keith: Right. If you go all the way back–and this is where it gets kind of murky because I
am talking about billions of years and the record, from a microscopic perspective as biolo-
gists look into this, it gets very difficult to follow. For instance, there is a conjecture that the
mitochondria actually have their origin as separate cells. They were quite sufficient to manu-
facture their own energy systems.
Participant: In bacteria.
Keith: You could call it that but they were separate organisms and they were either eaten
by or they were invaded by other larger cells which already had a nucleus with its own DNA.
But they’ve got their DNA in the mitochondria and it worked out (and this how the biologists
elaborate on this) to be a very fortunate, self-supportive arrangement for both sides–for both
the mitochondria that had a foreign origin, and for the cell itself that became the host for
these mitochondria.
Over time, they came to be mutually self-supportive, such that every cell eventually
through bacteria and through the great division that produced the Tetartocosmos or multi-
celled beings–all of that through this replication process continued on so that exactly where
the DNA of the cell nucleus came from at its origin, from what I understand, is still a big
mystery. So whether that’s male-female initially, in its origin, we are now back into cellular
biology that is in the microcosmic range, in Gurdjieff’s terms.
When we see that life appears on the planet Earth, we see first Microcosmos and then
we get Tetartocosmos and then multi-celled beings of various forms but, for three billion
years, it was all one cell. Every form of life on the planet was all one-celled beings. And
only then, only when the remarkable bridge to a multi-celled creature–only when that was
bridged finally, did we begin to see the elaboration that led to the present concentrations we
have of multi-celled beings and we have all kinds of clams and mussels–there are thousands
and thousands of species of multi-celled beings that are unbrained and from that, we get
these two great differentiations. One around chlorophyll around plants…it is interesting, we
could go into the chemistry of the chlorophyll molecule and how it serves a certain function
relative to photosynthesis and how, exchanging from that central portion of the molecule,
another element and you get something remarkably close to that which can function around
neural cell growth.
So the exact same process in one great unfolding from Tetartocosmos into the whole of
plant life from another unfolding comes all the potential of brained life. It is a very thrilling,
interesting notion that here, that which is going to support the whole of this comes and
they both emerge in this great unfolding from Tetartocosmos.

33
October Gathering 2016 ~ Friday Afternoon

Reading: The Death of my Ordinary “I” – Jeanne de Salzmann

I remember myself in the moment when I do not see myself as an object,
when consciousness leaves no room for division. It is the moment when,
feeling consciousness, I feel I am consciousness. I feel “I.” Remembering
oneself is the emotional shock that occurs when all the energies in us come
into contact. This emits a creative vibration that is immediately subject to
the Law of Seven. So, remembering oneself cannot remain static.
In my habitual state my experience is vague and nebulous. Thoughts,
waves of emotions and tensions arise. The thoughts do not come all at once;
they arrive one after the other. It is the same with the emotions. When one
thought has passed, another arises. But between the two there is an interval,
a stop, a space that is extremely important. Behind the movement that has
begun and finished, there is a reality that is hidden from me. In this interval
I can become aware of what is behind the movement. No thought lasts; what
appears must disappear. The disappearing is as important as the appearing.
It is part of the same fact. And if I can live the two, accept them both, I
am beyond the appearance and the disappearance. I contain them. In this
moment, my centers enter into relation with each other, a relation that
comes by itself.
Opening to our essential being, the higher centers, requires a state of
unity. But, in our usual state, our center of gravity is always refused in favor
of the ego and displaced toward the upper me but that, at the same time,
I do not trust. I do not have faith in it. I want it to yield to me. I am afraid,
afraid of disappearing.
In order for me to pass beyond this fragmentation, this separation from
my essential being, all the energy in me needs to blend. It needs to be
entirely liberated. Do I see the necessity for this? Do I accept it, do I wish
it? For this, an absolute tranquility needs to appear in all the parts of myself.
This is not in order to succeed, or to receive and appropriate to myself
something marvelous. Rather, it is to see my nothingness, my attachment,
my fear of losing the meaning I attribute to myself. Instead of always
wanting to be right, I see my contradictions. I see myself hypnotized by
my imagination. I see everything together, both my ego and the real “I.”
In so seeing, I liberate myself. For a moment I am no longer the same.
My freed attention, my consciousness, then knows what I am essentially.
This is the death of my ordinary “I.” To remember oneself means to die to
oneself, to the lie of one’s imagination. I have the taste of understanding
through awareness of the lack of understanding. In remembering oneself,
it is the letting go of the ego that allows a new consciousness to penetrate.
Then I see that the ordinary “I” is a phantom, a projection of myself. In
fact, everything I take as manifestation is not something separate, but a
projection of the essential. Returning to the source, I become conscious of
that which arises not to fall back, that which is not born and does not die—
the eternal Self.1

1 de Salzmann, Jeanne, The Reality of Being, pp 262-64

34
Keith: This is obviously a very high state that Madam is referring to, to have a moment in
which she ends the portion of her essay on the death of my ordinary “I,” how one could wish
that but seeing, as she points out, steps on the path, in other words, what is required to reach
this point where my ordinary “I” dies.
And you see what has to be suffered again and again and again – all of those views we
have of ourselves that we have to put aside, that we have to see and in a sense, with attention,
which sounds contradictory, and shunned. So how do we shun something? How do we turn
our attention away from something that is right there in front of us? If I see this mechan-
icalness to my manifestation, and I judge it for what it is, how do I turn away from it?
What are your thoughts, what are your associations about that? When I see something
that is bound up in my ordinary “I” in myself in a moment, when I bring attention to it–talk
about that. What do I do? What happens? What can happen?
Participant: Gurdjieff said man must separate himself from himself. Until he can do that,
no one can help him. I have found that a useful saying if I see an impulse in myself or see
negative thoughts. There is an exercise: these are my thoughts, they are not I–these are my
feelings, they are not I–this is my body, it is not I. It makes me work to connect with some-
thing Higher which is like withdrawing from one’s attention from one part of oneself, hope-
fully striving to have one’s attention in a higher part of oneself
Participant: When I see things in myself that I don’t like or surprises me–when I say, oh,
look at that – I have a habit of coming to my breath. It is a way to escape from that and just
to be with me. I don’t know if that is the best way but it is what I have done for years, when
I see, which is rare.
Keith: When you move to the breath in that circumstance, what happens then?
Participant: I seem to find myself in the watcher–watches the breath and that is different
than the thing I saw in my personality that I didn’t like. That is the technique that works for
me.
Participant: My experience is that the act of seeing is, in fact, a big deal. To see is to do
and that is, in itself, something. My experience is that I have to work to be passive to myself,
actively passive, so that that the ‘fixer’ in me doesn’t try to change things. I try to work to
let things happen and not judge myself so that I can have an opportunity to see it, to create
some kind of gap whereby seeing may occur.
Keith: Do you find that you react inside of that state?
Participant: Yes, often.
Keith: One key here seems certainly to have to do with the effort we make with our atten-
tion because if we don’t see something clearly then it’s like all bets are off. Nothing is going
to happen except what was going to happen and it is just going to continue to be the same.
When attention enters into that, we now have a divided state. There is the attention
and there is that which is seen.
Participant: It reminds me of something you said this morning about self and other.
Because when I see myself, it is almost like seeing another. I am in myself. I see my self
and my ordinary self which is other than that.

35
Keith: Good point. Do any of you experience those inner states as if you were meeting a
stranger and you wonder–where did that come from? Do you have that sense at times when
you see a particular way in which you have said something or a motion you have taken or
some manifestation and, because you attend to it, you are brought abruptly to having this
question: where that come from?
Participant: I’ve had that when I’ve been dishonest. Interacting with a customer, I would
see that and I would quickly move away from it. It would surprise me but it was there; it
would be an aspect of a role where I could exaggerate a problem. It wasn’t something I
initiated; it was just a reaction to a question of what is the problem and I would just respond.
That’s why I say being dishonest.
Keith: What changes when the attention enters, when you have that moment of suddenly
seeing what some aspect of yourself has been up to? How close can you come to that inter-
face? What is it like?
Participant: For me it is in stages. I call what I do in the face of something like this
“cheating”–to do what I have to do because I don’t feel strong enough to do anything else.
I sense myself. When I sense myself, I also catch the constellation of tensions in myself
that are accompanying who I am pretending to be or my dishonest presentation of myself.
I catch those tensions and I let the tensions go and either before that or during or after, I
experience shame that I am manifesting
Keith: Do we suffer when we feel shame?
Participant: Very painful.
Keith: It seems it is evident that when we see how crude we have been or how impolite
or how injurious we have been towards another one. Something sees that and then we feel
shame. What is going on right in that moment? See if we can follow the track of what the
attention has led to. Because the attention has opened a door right here that has allowed
something else in.
Participant: I think we are still identified with what we are seeing. We haven’t separated
completely.
Keith: But the attention is the instrument of that separation.

Functional Relationships
of Attention
Focus
Imaging–H 48–24

Attention
Meaning / Choice / Separation
Consciousness Willed Attention
+
– –
H 24 –12 H 12– 6

36
Participant: When we reach the point that was being spoken of there is a stillness and
a silence that accompanies that when we have relaxed our body and we are in a state of
attentiveness to other and their need. There is an inner silence there.
Keith: In re-reading what Madam has written, do you think she thought of this while
she was in the midst of an ordinary life event?
Participant: No.
Keith: No. That’s my point. What has been shared so far has been ordinary life events,
when, suddenly, something wakes up and sees something, and as a result of that seeing
–now follow the track here–a result of the attention.
Now we have to wonder –what is inside of this attention? What is the power of this
attention?
Participant: It is a little bit like remorse.
Keith: Yes!
Participant: Something revolts; it is a feeling because one part sees the other part and
naturally notices an organic shame that has been spoken of, not the wrong kind of shame
but the sense of loving what is real and admitting what is false.
Keith: But seeing.
Participant: Yes, from seeing in oneself.
Keith: I am thinking that, for myself, there is a lot more power in the attention than we
have been giving it credit for. We have been talking about attention as if, ‘you see it’. Well,
go into that deeper. Attention is a much more powerful tool, at a much more powerful
level.

Second Conscious Shock

s Fo
es ur
s nMI t
ou

FA
h

12
ci

6
St

DO
ns

SOL LA
at

768
Co

12 6
e

SI RE
384
of

of

12
ct

n
lle

tio
e

Con
Inte
Stat

Emo

sciousness

RE
Body

24 FA LA MI SI
Third

24 24 192 6
Higher

Higher

DO
DO 192
48
SOL FA
First 48 96
Conscious
Shock MI RE
48 96
Mechanical Feeling and Sensation
(External Senses, Endocrine System and Oxygen)

37
 This is a ‘hydrogen’ 12– all the 12s are of this quality; whether it is si12 as Gurdjieff’s
Exioëhary or whether it is sol 12 or mi 12 . The 12s characterizes it at a certain level or
quality of energy.
For me, the qualifier across all three in the 12s is attention.2 With Higher Emotional
Center, it is a creative attention that enters into the artistic life, expression. It is that seeing-
in-the-moment the miraculousness that we see reflected in people like Da Vinci, Mozart
or other people in the artistic arena; it is that vision in the moment when something is seen
that is a very creative element in what gets produced and the result of that artistic, creative
moment.
We start talking about someone like Einstein and I think we are talking about mi12. It is
the creative higher intellectual activity that, in a moment, sees into the nature of something
and then won’t give up. As he himself admitted, I see something and then I am damned to
follow it. Something in his attention saw and then he had no choice; he had to stay with that
and keep after it, in spite of what all the people around him said. He kept at this until finally,
he arrived at something.
This is characteristic of mi12 –the real exploration but concerning the higher intellect.
Whereas, in the case of the emotional; we are talking about the spiritual or the artistic but,
in any case, it is that attention that is the creative initiator, if you will, of what follows on that.

Keep in mind Gurdjieff has told us every ‘hydrogen’ category is very large, so when we
are talking about ‘hydrogen’ 12 or si12 [of the Food Octave], we are talking about everything
that underpins the motivating factors in our ordinary, mechanical life. All of our sexuality, our
interaction with other people, our motivation to be physically active, all of our ordinary stuff
about learning to read and to write–all that is down here; all that is accomplishable with the
attention that is given to the physical body. It is all Exioëhary. He puts it in this category of
sex energy but, if we think deeply into the primal triad [World One] and given the highest
expression of Exioëhary, of si12, it is the energy that is behind, underneath reproduction. It
has nothing to do with the egg and the sperm; it is what makes it possible for the egg and the
sperm to come together in a creative moment in a whole new being! That’s the Exioëhary
that Gurdjieff is pointing to there.
But then you can apply that to the physical body and step it down and down. There are
many, levels in which si12 will have application in ordinary life–similarly so with sol12 and
with mi12.
So we have a long distance. We can take this attention we have been talking about
because there is a quality of attention to all of these things. One attends and tries to learn
how to play the piano, how to dance–any of these things that require an increasingly refined
attention. We are talking about the same quality of energy that is a 12. They are all 12s
but they apply to many, many levels inside of us. We should never give up on the creative
capacity of attention, because attention being a 12 has this creative capacity. So the result
of attention is that we see things but we also see into things, which was referred to earlier
about shame.
Why would you feel shame? Because it is in the nature of the attention to see what you
have been and what you are and put those right in front of you and there you are. What
do you do with that? We are suddenly met with this very great obvious conflict inside of

2 Buzzell, A New Conception of God Further Reflections on Gurdjieff’s Whim, chapter 16,
“Attention (H12), The Greatest Gift to Life; The Power to Pursue Meaning and Purpose,” pp 280-299

38
ourselves. But that is the creative aspect of the attention, so don’t ever think of attention
as a single thing, like flashing a light bulb on something.
Participant: I don’t know if this is an example but there is some kind of simultaneity
involved also. For example, we are trying to see to ourselves and we don’t often speak about
this thing, chief feature. There is something that is the thing and, always, that’s where it goes
emotionally. As was said, there is progression, one sees something, I react, but, eventually,
I see it over and over again, something recognizes; it is more identified, what this thing
is. Something starts to hunt. When I feel in despair that it has swallowed up my inner life
and I’ll never be free of it–for example, today I had the same reaction but in a completely
different arena. I recognized it, this is the same thing; this is more data. This actually helps
because now I know a little more than I knew yesterday. It is not necessarily a pattern but
something is hunting for the roots of it. It goes back to primordial relationships (father,
mother…) but also goes the other way. It seems to take persistence, a feeling like I can’t
waste any more time and just randomly seeing these things, unrelated. It has something to
do with attention because something is hunting in my emotional world and it hits a wall but
if I persist and don’t give up then I think more is given.
Keith: Mrs. P told a delightful story along this line which was paralleled by one of my own.
She was one of one of Ouspensky’s secretaries for several years so she was always doing
things for him as secretary. One day when she brought in something she proposed to do or
had gone ahead and done it, he turned on her and, in a very angry voice, said, “Irmis, you are
always inventing!” She felt chagrined and embarrassed by the whole situation. She said, “it
took me three years before I realized he had told me my chief feature!” She was one of the
most inventive, creative people. In events, she could take nothing and make a big event out
of it. She was always inventing; she was very creative that way.
The first week I was at the Pinnacle, it was a very hot. At the end of the 10-day session,
she put on a party and we all had whisky sours. She loves whisky sours so we are sitting out
in the garden area outside and I figured this was my last day so if I have a personal question
I would really like to ask, I better do it now, right away. So when the opportunity came, I
approached Mrs. Popoff and asked, “Mrs. Popoff, could you tell me something that I could
work on in my inner world?” She was very quiet for maybe two minutes, almost to the point
where I wondered if she heard me or not. Then she turned and said, “Well, Keith, I’ve only
known you for ten days and you hide very well.” That was it. I won’t tell you how many years
it took to discover that [laughter] but it’s one indicator of her marvelous quality of attention.
The attention is there and it never disappeared over all those years Mrs. P wondered
and suddenly she woke up the gift that Ouspensky had given her. It was the attention that
did that; the attention working in her. We should remember that this quality of attention is
like that. It is not a something that comes on like a light bulb.
We have a very distorted image of what attention is really about. It is the highest creative
energy in us. And it always there–there is always that quality of attention that is available to
us. How to approach it; we have to draw it down. This is what is standing at 5 on the en-
neagram and looking up to 8. We are asking for something to descend from 8 to 5, to make
possible the transition into the third part of the octave.
It is very much worthwhile to make the effort to see that we stand in the face of some-
thing that it is there–it is there inside of each of us and we must call it down. We can say I
will make an effort to pay attention; I will watch the best I can and then we are always (at

39
least I have this quality often) thunderstruck when it happens. Suddenly you see something!
But you know it has been dependent upon the fact that the attention is in us. It does not
come from outer space. It is in us; it is part of our higher emotional and higher intellectual
functioning.
Because it shares the creative qualities of attention, as all three 12s do, it is the best
that we have to call down. It is Exioëhary that is available to us in our ordinary world, in our
ordinary life without a Kesdjan or Higher Being-body and without being in that octave trying
to go higher in that octave and so on. In our ordinary world, our ordinary blind, dumb world
that we live inside of– the quality of attention that we are talking about is available to us
because it is not sol12 or mi12, it is si12, it is sex energy. Sex energy is the attention that
is available to us.
So we can rightly say, “Pay attention. Pay Attention.” Because it is there. And what
it brings is not the flashlight. The flashlight is a little tiny part of it; the rest is the creative
possibility that comes from the seeing and then the result. If the result is a moment of
remorse then that is a treasure. I’ve seen something about my nature that I have never seen
before and in this moment, suddenly it is there. Other times it can be a real joyful thing,
when suddenly you see in your child a feature that you have never really absorbed before
and you see what a sweet, marvelous little human being there is in their manifestation in
the moment and it is a gift. But it comes because we pay attention.
Participant: A few days ago, I carpooled with a friend of ours and I hopped in the back
seat. There was a big jug of Roundup there. It was maximum strength. She said it was great,
you can spray it on something and it kills it for a year. She was so happy with it. Later on
she was saying how she was going to vote for Trump. This whole thing was going on in me;
she’s talking to Mr. Organic-Free-range-All-Natural-Tree-hugger. A few minutes later,
she was holding a ribbon at a track meet. She was helping my wife get past this ribbon. I
had to juxtapose that first image of her with this one, where she was being so helpful to my
wife and being quite there with her. It evoked this question: how can I embrace both those
impressions? It is a real struggle and is a tension to hold it together in the emotional part.
It is just like this thing about seeing something in the child you didn’t expect but that was
effort–to hold that contradiction and to see she was a wonderful person.
Keith: … if she would just change her mind.
Participant: If I could just reason with her.
Participant: How does Askokin relate to this sensation in your study?
Keith: Good point. Because buried inside of events can be, when approached creatively
with the attention, we can see something in the order of higher emotion or higher intellect;
we can see something creatively that is genuinely lovable or appreciate-able in terms of
beauty or in terms of understanding how the laws happen and why they work the way they
do. So we can see in those moments.
Participant: Is that Askokin?
Keith: That is extracted from the Askokin. I don’t think for a minute that Gurdjieff is trying
to deny… experience is experience. Life flows. It is a part of that river where he is saying
you can catch what you really need if you are paying attention, if you are fishing cleverly. You

40
can pull out what you need. There may be a lot of Abrustdonis and Helkdonis in there but
you don’t need all that. If you just wish for it and you don’t try to fish, then you are not going
to get it either. But it is there for all of us–it is the flow of life. To free Askokin is like that;
we have to see it as the flow of all that we experience, all that comes into our purview, that
becomes a source of our possible Abrustdonis, Helkdonis.
Participant: I am getting a little stuck on something you are saying about attention. I think
what you are saying is “free” attention. It’s funny because I am always attending to something
but often it is attending to something and its involved in this but I am not really there to pay
attention but it’s paying attention.
Keith: Every brained being has to have a certain level of attention. Actually, even cells,
Microcosmos, can, with very adequate justification, be understood because it pays attention,
it is aware of molecules, of a certain charge on their exterior coating and so forth, outside the
cell wall, inside the cell wall, what has to be rejected, what can be reached out to and used
as a source of food­– all of that requires some level of attention. As Gurdjieff says, everything
in the Universe is alive to some degree. He gives the gamut of Reason, from Absolute Calm,
which is no reason at all, all the way to the incomparable Reason of his endlessness. It’s
like that; there is that inside of it that will have some level of attention; it may be mechanical
to answer your question. In us, it is often very mechanical but that’s not what we are talking
about.

We haven’t got there yet, but this can never be evoked without the Will, without some
reflection from the Will. If not the Wish, then we have to wish a lot. Like Gurdjieff says,
must Wish. Wish is next to Will. Without the Wish, there is no Will. Without that, there is
no Attention – to want to have the Attention. It has to be evoked.
Participant: Are the 12s Attention or is the Attention on a higher level and the 12s are
the crystallization of it in the form that we can use.

Keith: I put the Will at ‘hydrogen’ 6 so ‘hydrogen’ 12 as the Attention is the power of the
Will but it is at the disposition of the Will. So, we have to wish for it.
We have to wish to pay attention.
Now, take that seriously. When you discipline yourself, when you kick yourself in the
foot, “now pay attention!” that is wishing of a sort. It is putting a push into what we really
want, what we really wish for and that’s Okay.

41
Endnote: from Reflections on Gurdjieff’s Whim, p 44
The Work brings the methods and understanding that make this rebalancing, this
reconciliation, possible. In this Work, the power of attention — the photonic
reconciling power of Parijrahatnatioose3 — is of premier importance. As recorded
by Madame de Hartmann:

From the very beginning the conversations related to attention. Mr Gurdjieff

told us very seriously that attention is absolutely indispensable for any work we
wished to do with him. If we did not understand that, nothing could bring us to
the aim for which we came to him. All of us there already felt that we were
more than just a body. We knew that ‘something else’ was in us, and we
wished to know: what is that? What have we to do with that? How can we
call to it? How can we bring it out? How can we rely on it and not depend only
on the body? All this was really a burning question for us, and Mr Gurdjieff
made it clear that if we didn’t study attention–not study in the ordinary way,
but putting all our attention on developing that attention–we would arrive
nowhere.

Triad of Okidanokh 4

Anodnatious
+

+
– –
Parijrahatnatioose Cathodnatious

3 G. I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales, pp 156-57

4 Buzzell, Reflections on Gurdjieff’s Whim, pp 112-13

42
October Gathering 2016 ~ Friday Evening

Keith: Mandy asked an interesting question tonight: When do we recognize in The Tales
that Hassein begins to develop more than just interest in the three-brained beings? Does
anybody have enough familiarity to know when that begins to show in the language? 1
Participant: When Hassein calls the three-brained beings “slugs”2 and Beelzebub rebukes
him for doing that because they might hear it.
Keith: Yes, but Beelzebub then goes into retribution for that if they do hear–what they
would do to him and so on. Why would that produce an increased interest on Hassein’s
part? At first Hassein asks, do they have Higher Being-bodies; do they go to Purgatory?
Participant: It was when he realized they don’t develop properly that he took more
interest.
Participant: I was thinking when he started crying but it showed before but that was
very apparent when he started crying.
Keith: It is surprisingly evident early in The Tales that Beelzebub refers to this interest
and they become of interest to him and then they become “favorites” of his and then they
become “your people [favorites].” But it is that transition that Mandy had a question about
and I think it is a good question.
Can we identify in The Tales where that movement towards warmth, towards genuine
interest in the three-brained beings of Earth–when did that begin to appear?
Participant: Because then they become his “favorites,” and then finally Hassein
becomes his substitute. So there is a real progression throughout The Tales, the distinction
that Beelzebub makes in relation to Hassein. I wondered how did Beelzebub know how
Hassein was feeling about these peculiar three-brained beings on the planet Earth and how
did he discern when these changes occurred in Hassein’s interest and involvement and then
finally taking on the responsibility for these peculiar three-brained beings?
Keith: The responsibility is not for them but to do what he can, to try to help.
Participant: There is a section at the end of the chapter “War” or before the chapter on
“Justice” where, for Hassein, it shifts into a burning question where he is mystified as to
how it will end for them. Something can’t be right about this. And then he talks about never
having doubted the pillars of justice in the Universe. I believe that precedes the chapter
“Justice.”
Keith: Yes, that is my remembrance, that the more than genuine degree of interest but
really some affection or caring about appears earlier but I am interested if anybody can
identify where that could be. Well, it is something to look for when you are reading The

1 G.I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales, “Your favorites” appears 498 times throughout The Tales. and first appear
in the chapter “Time,” p 127. Hassein mentions the interesting planet Earth on p 105, “Fantasy as Reality,”
and in chapter viii, he says “Yes, Grandfather, yes, just that. Tell me about those ‘men-beings’, a little more
in detail. I should like to know more about them,” concluded Hassein.
2 Ibid., “The Impudent Brat Hassein Dares to Call Men “Slugs”” p 79

43
Tales and, when you come upon it, you can send an email to everyone here and let them
know that this is where it is–that there is this evidence.3
Participant: One question that sticks out in my mind is when Hassein asks “What do they
think of as good and what evil?”4 That was point when he wondered how do they think?
How do they feel? Because they don’t feel like I do, so what do they call “good” and what
do they call “evil?” Maybe that was when he was beginning to put himself in their place.
Keith: I think early on, he is certainly impressed with the decision of the High Commission
to implant Kundabuffer. The unfairness of it seems to impress him greatly.
Let’s turn it around. One other inference of that would have to do with, how do we un-
derstand Hassein relative to how we understand our role? If Gurdjieff through Beelzebub
is speaking directly to us individually, what do we do with that?
Participant: One point that was mentioned about how the relationship of Hassein to the
three-brained beings of Earth can be reflected in our attitude towards others around us,
which can change and develop in that self-other relationship where in the end we develop
some sort of impartial Love for our fellow human beings, a genuine caring.
Keith: He does seem to point to a possible parallel. He alludes to this in the sense when
he says that sometime in the future, you just might happen visit this planet; he doesn’t put
it down there as a requirement or necessity or something that is going to happen. But he
does raise the possibility that you may find yourself amongst these people. But no mention
is made of what that would mean.
Here we have the whole of The Tales where Beelzebub, step by step through each
of the descents, is unearthing an enormously deep understanding of mankind, of our
circumstances and our possibilities and our difficulties. Now he has unearthed all of this;
it is the education, the Oskiano, of Hassein. So he has brought all of this education into
Hassein’s world and, as the chapter “Form and Sequence” demonstrates, Hassein has
absorbed this; he has taken it in. What does he do with it? What do we do with it? How
do we match that up with our understanding of what our Work is? How do we bridge that
or is there any need to bridge?
Am I just being obtuse and not seeing something that is perfectly obvious? What is the
task that he may undertake if he happens to find himself on the planet Earth? After this
education, after all this very detailed study and application of the Laws to the life of mankind
and it is now, presumptively all of it, is in Hassein. Hassein has his portion of his education.
Okay. If that is us, what does it mean?
Participant: Responsibility.
Keith: For what?
Participant: Is war part of it?
Keith: Certainly, part of it. But Beelzebub already gave his answer to that. It would take a
very, very long time, perhaps never, or by the assistance of a great Being. He does mention
that possibility of assistance coming.

3 Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales, “Second Descent,” p 187

4 Ibid., p 342, “And which of their manifestations do they consider good, and which bad?”

44
Participant: I remember someone asking Gurdjieff why he writes in cafes and he says so
I can see everyone walking by in Paris and it is my love for these people that makes me
write. His motivation evoked something very strong in me–the love he felt for everyone
around him feeds his Work.
Keith: There is another interesting inference in this. We go through the end of The Tales
and all of the education of Hassein. Hassein has never been to the Earth and … here we
are. So what is this?
Participant: So Beelzebub refers to him as his future replacement.
Keith: Substitute, future substitute, yes, and also the bearer of all the consequences of
his actions, of Beelzebub’s actions on the Earth. But that still doesn’t give us a satisfactory
understanding of how through the whole of The Tales and all of his education and never
having been to the Earth—how do we see ourselves in that context? Is it that part of us
really, really hasn’t been on the Earth, in ordinary life? Is it that part of us that has the
possibility, the potential for transforming that really lies out there somewhere but until
we enter, we don’t really enter this world. We are just a figment; we are just a mechanism.
But then, when we enter this world, with knowledge of it and with purpose, then we have
responsibility.
Hassein doesn’t have to go through the six descents. The descents are a thorough
exploration of the major foibles, the major things that are going to affect man: his outside
life in the first three descents and then when we come to the fourth descent [Fourth Per-
sonal Sojourn] and we get the apes and Belcultassi and now the inner work begins with the
fourth descent, when Beelzebub begins to go into the inner life and from then on, through
the chapters “Art” and “Fruits of Former Civilizations” and on, finally, to “America.” This
is a deeper and deeper penetration into man’s spiritual psychology, it seems.
So all of this is accomplished and, hopefully, by the time we have read Beelzebub’s Tales
three times, we have a sense of this and sense of a responsibility. But I am just bringing the
question out there to consider. What does that mean? What kind of responsibility does it
put on each of us?
Participant: I think objectivity has a role to play here. Hassein represents in one way
the education of higher emotion. It is interesting that it is being educated from above,
not directly from below. The way the Work prepares us so when we start observing into
ourselves, those observations gradually meet with increasing objectivity, even compassion,
based on the understanding of the dilemma that all our lower mechanical parts are in. That
is the objectivity and compassion that we have a responsibility to bring to other people but
we first have to find it in ourselves. This reminds me of Gurdjieff’s statement to Ouspensky
that the higher centers are there complete and trying to talk to us but we can’t hear them.
So there seems to be the implication that potential understanding and objectivity must
already be in us in higher levels, waiting for those higher levels to develop and open.
Participant: Somehow I am connecting this with the Strivings, we are given the back-
ground and education of ourselves to indicate to us just why we should be doing our best
to strive in those five ways. So it would seem Hassein, and parallel to that, ourselves are
shown why they are necessary.
Participant: Is there a relationship between Gornahoor Rakhoorkh and Hassein?

45
Keith: Talk that out.
Participant: I am speculating on the nature of Hassein who hasn’t been to Earth
apparently who is non-mass based and who is concerned about Higher Being-bodies and
who’s got the results of Beelzebub’s experience inculcated. Where else can this be applied
except in the degrees of Reason? And isn’t that what the son of Gornahoor Harharkh is
concerned with?
Keith: As I remember, he was concerned because his efforts at active mentation were
interfered with when the dynamo was on and that’s what he brings to Beelzebub’s attention.
It is Beelzebub who discovers, ah ha! this is imbalance of energies; he’s the one who makes
the connection between Mars and the Earth. It is Beelzebub not Rakhoorkh.
The question that John raises brings us all the way back to the beginning of The Tales
where Gurdjieff has created this mythic solar system, the Sun that neither lights nor heats,
the Sun, the Moon, Anulios, Mars and Saturn. By exploring or using these as images of states
or circumstances or laws–all of that, he shifts back and forth and in between and makes use
of them when he has lawful point to try to get across to Hassein.
But he has himself been exiled. Why was he exiled? How do you understand that? I
realize this may seem a jump in a different direction but, for me, it is intimately related to
this question about Hassein. Why was Beelzebub exiled?
Participant: He did not have the maturity of the Higher centers. He was questioning
why the Absolute was doing all these things.
Keith: He certainly raises a question.
Participant: He did not understand what was happening; it was a lack of maturity in his
three brains.
Participant: His questioning led to the other beings to revolt against some of the decisions
imposed by the higher command so they interfered to bring it all down.
Keith: This is interesting. How many of you have tried to think a lot about why Beelzebub
was exiled? I think it is a very interesting question cosmologically and spiritually, philosophi-
cally. It is a very subtle and complex question. Not as straightforward–the fiery Beelzebub
who judges and then he is exiled. It is much more involved.
Participant: One way I look at this is that Beelzebub got into trouble because he didn’t
have practical understanding. He didn’t understand certain laws so he has to go get real life
experience.
Participant: Because of his callow youth.
Participant: Right. The archangels and angels don’t have to get practical experience which
is why they make a lot of errors because they are born perfect but not with the experience
that comes from making mistakes and suffering and developing compassion.
So Beelzebub went up to the Sun Absolute; he certainly must have had angelic rank or
potential rank and yet, even though the rest can make mistakes and don’t get exiled, he got
exiled and the result was that he developed such great wisdom that even angels and archan-
gels bowed down to him.
Keith: They do that before. He is identified as “Your Reverence” by Looisos early on.

46
Participant: Yes, but he has already been here a while. My impression is that there was
some special potential in Beelzebub; he was allowed just to make mistakes like the rest of
the angels. He was singled out to be sent away for an education so that he could come back
with an understanding that even the archangels and angels and maybe even endlessness
didn’t have. There is a statement somewhere in there that a three-brained creature that
develops all this potential is in some way higher than the angels.
So why out of all the angels that make mistakes, why was Beelzebub the exception?
There is something special about him, the special role he had to play or something he had
to learn distinguished him from all the other celestial denizens.
Keith: Gurdjieff never identifies him with the angelic world, the higher angelic world,
never. He is very clever. He just doesn’t go there. This is Beelzebub.
Participant: But isn’t it kind of paradoxical that he calls himself Beelzebub and Beelzebub
is identified as a fallen angel in Biblical terms.
Participant: At the same time, he says that Beelzebub was three-brained like us who
arose on the planet Karatas.
Participant: Yes, that is the paradox.
Participant: I agree; I think it is a good paradox. But I’d like to go back to the question of
what was the revolt and read from The Tales. I think there is some information on page 672
when Beelzebub is in Paris and he sees the people around him as no different than those of
ancient times:
“Then, namely, for the second time in the whole of my existence, there
proceeded in my Being the process of this same being-Sarpitimnian-
experiencing, which had engendered in my common presence a revolt on
account of various unforeseeingnesses on the part of our Most High, Most
Saintly Cosmic Individuals, and of all the objective misfortunes flowing
from them, which have already obtained and, maybe, will still continue to
obtain on this planet Earth as well as in all our Great Universe.
“How was it possible not to foresee in their calculations of the
harmonious movement of cosmic concentrations that the comet Kondoor
would collide with this ill-fated planet Earth? 5
Participant: That sounds like what Beelzebub would have said to endlessness.
Keith: You mean part of his objection?
Participant: This event of the collision had not yet occurred when Beelzebub was exiled
because it was when he was on the planet Mars that the collision occurred. Is there some-
thing resonant that he revolted against?
Keith: What does he say? Go back to the opening chapter and find the revolt that leads to
the exile. It is right there; it is very simple and straightforward.
Participant: He was minding somebody else’s business, something that was none of his
business.

5 Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales, p 762.

47
Keith: No, he was finally told it was none of his business and he’s never to do that again,
even when he comes home and is recognized as this great Being, he has to take this pledge
that he will never stick his nose into other’s business. Go back to the revolt.
It was just then that, owing to the as yet unformed Reason due to his
youth, and owing to his callow and therefore still impetuous mentation with
unequally flowing association – that is, owing to a mentation based, as is
natural to beings who have not yet become definitely responsible, on a
limited understanding–Beelzebub once saw in the government of the
World something which seemed to him “illogical,” 6 …
Keith: There you are. He says it very directly. He saw something that he thought
was illogical.
Participant: Doesn’t that have a little bit of resonance with Belcultassi? He saw
something in himself that was illogical.
Keith: Beelzebub is seeing something illogical in the world, in the Universe.
Participant: I wonder is it really the outside world?
Keith: Well….
Participant: He got a lot of others to agree with him, almost half the beings of
the Universe.
Keith: No, we don’t know.
Participant: He said it almost came to the edge of revolution.
Participant: It clearly isn’t because he saw something illogical. Its okay to question things
but the problem is what he did with this idea. Instead of exploring what he thought was
illogical, maybe impartially, getting to know things in depth, the decisions he made led to
almost revolt and so he was not able to judge it impartially.
Participant: Can we look at the Third Series where he talks about endlessness and what
endlessness has a need for? 7 When he was talking about a permanent reminding factor in
netherworlds; isn’t that the big allegory about Beelzebub’s Tales?
Keith: A reminding factor, yes.
Participant: Beelzebub is far away from endlessness for the purposes of endlessness
and isn’t the cash return for endlessness where he asks this question, now I want to find
out if this has paid off and what did you learn? What can be done–through Hassein?
Keith: Yes, through Hassein. Yes, I choose to think this is endlessness’ question. I think
we have to tie that, that it is endlessness’ question back to the exile because I believe that
Gurdjieff has associated them.
Participant: I see it in terms of an evolutionary movement up from endlessness
dropping down to enneagram. It is interesting then that he winds up being banished to

6 Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales, p 52.

7 Ibid., Life is Real Only Then, When “I am;” Prologue, pp 19-25

48
Mars where he sets up his observatory, which is like his penance. It seems like it is something
about the laws.

... looking down the Ray of Creation ... 9/0 —DO

SI 8 — 3 2 1 1 RE —1 2 3

LA 7 — 3 1 2 2 MI — 1 3 2

... greater complexity going

down the Ray of Creation ...

SOL — 2 1 3 FA — 2 3 1

So imagining a descent down from do to si to the next point where it’s the 3–1–2, the
triad of lawfulness, something he didn’t see as logical in the unfolding administration of the
Universe so maybe something that he needed to discover in terms of relationship to other.
It seems illogical but...
Keith: That’s the way I take it. He saw something, from that perspective, looking down
the Ray of Creation and that it reaches a point where things get more and more compli-
cated and more and more infinitely more complex. And he thinks, that doesn’t make sense;
it should have greater order; it should have greater stability because this is after all the
Universe, etc.. His insistent question is that it should not be illogical. It should be accord-
ing to law. And he comes to the conclusion that it looks like it isn’t according to law.
Participant: So endlessness sends him to the Lateral Octave, to Mars, which is necessary
for the Ray of Creation to complete.
Keith: Exactly, good point.
Participant: Is Gurdjieff trying to tell something about the two sides of the coin of egoism
and/or individuality because here’s Beelzebub as a callow youth taken to Holy Sun Absolute
and he is very intelligent and very resourceful. Is he telling us something about egoism? Now
he has this I but it is not educated. It is not that it is bad it just needs to be educated and
develop higher reason so he suffers that.
Participant: So why do we need Hassein, why is Hassein needed in the story? Why wasn’t
the story complete at the end when Beelzebub delivered his news to endlessness? He
could have delivered it in some other way. How is Hassein a sensible and sufficient substi-
tute when he never actually has the experience that Beelzebub had?
Keith: What experience?
Participant: The experience of Earth from the bottom up. He only has a second generation
from the Teaching of his grandfather.

49
Participant: Beelzebub’s difficulty, as a fiery youth, is that he saw something illogical. He
was using his mental capacity. So he was sent to Mars which, in the way we are looking at
it, represents higher emotional. In order to have understanding, Gurdjieff says we need
knowledge and experience and that understanding can really come from the feeling world
and Beelzebub has to develop it in the feeling world. And the way he’s educating Hassein
is by educating his feelings. So Hassein begins to feel interested and then concerned and
maybe even a sense of responsibility.
Keith: I like that.
Participant: One part in the reading, he was talking about he was a youth, so it’s almost
he still is in preparatory age, so that he doesn’t have his own I, so therefore he talks about
unequally flowing associations and that is why he made choices because he wasn’t balanced;
he hadn’t reached responsible age; he was meddling which led to the mistake he made.
Keith: It has a lot of paradoxes in that because there is the description of those who
accompany Beelzebub. We find that the previous chief Zirlikner of the whole of Karatas
comes with him. What does that mean? Here is the guide for all the beings of Karatas who
is to be their guide, counselor, corrector and so forth and yet he is exiled with Beelzebub.
Plus there is a whole bunch of people–his kinsmen etc., whatever that means. We are left
to our own devices when it comes to his kinsmen.
Participant: Sounds like his Zirlikner lacked something in terms of his emotional
understanding because Beelzebub was one of his prize pupils so everybody had to go
down including his teacher.
Participant: How about considering the fact that the angels and archangels and endless-
ness himself cannot enter the Universe in the same way that Beelzebub and his kinsmen
can to come figure it out. Beelzebub can do that.
Keith: In what way?
Participant: By being exiled.
Keith: Yes, but is it Beelzebub who, after all, doesn’t have a physical body. He comes from
Karatas; he is taken on the Holy Sun Absolute; he clearly does not have a physical body.
Participant: You do keep saying that but every time I read it in The Tales I still anthropo-
morphize Beelzebub tucking his tail etc., so here he is maybe a callow youth but he has
real promise, he can enter into the Universe and Mars, observe the solar system in a way
the angels, archangels and definitely endlessness cannot.
Keith: What you may have touched upon for me is the edge of an even more ridiculous
question and that is: does endlessness also have a role in this? That Beelzebub is not sent
away in exile because of something he didn’t do right, whatever, but does endlessness have
a question.
Participant: I would think so. We create our Universe and ninety percent of the time we
can’t enter it either. There are people out there that we can’t change. All we can do is to
strive to understand. So Beelzebub, Hassein and the Kinsmen are offering that back to Holy
Sun Absolute and endlessness.

50
Keith: But in the end, endlessness, through Hassein, has this question.
Participant: Because what they discover is war. They discover unbecoming behavior that
doesn’t help the Universe survive and exist and evolve but it goes the other direction.
Keith: But that is not the answer to endlessness’ question. endlessness, through
Hassein, when Hassein addresses the sacred Podkoolad at the very end of The Tales, “if
you were standing before endlessness” and, suddenly, he is. The inference is very clear
that, at that moment, Beelzebub is standing before endlessness and the question that is
given or put on Beelzebub is endlessness’ question: what can be done? This is not a High
School graduation; he is not asking a question of Beelzebub in order to see if he gives him
the right answer. He needs the answer.
That is another possibility where we can say, “does this Universe, as created, become
so complex and so confounded as you go down through the lawfulnesses, that it takes on
increasing risk.” More and more things may go wrong and, finally, something does go wrong
down in Worlds 48-96. What is the answer to that? What can be done?
Participant: Earlier heard a schoolteacher speak about how, when the children begin
to understand and take responsibility, they become a help. I was so touched by that story
because it rang true for me. I look at Beelzebub and Hassein and even dear Ahoon to bring
back information that will help endlessness understand. But it is three-brained beings that
have to have responsibility that can evolve consciously and bring the understanding of law.
Keith: Well, how about the answer that Beelzebub gives. What is the answer that
Beelzebub gives? A new organ.
Participant: So it is almost like he is petitioning endlessness like those angels did.
And likely people on Purgatory did too, to enter Creation again and make some change.
Keith: It was to implant a new organ, like Kundabuffer. How can we understand that?
This is the end of The Tales and this is the answer that Beelzebub gives to endlessness
–to implant a new organ.
Participant: But this would be an organ to keep us awake. Kundabuffer was an organ
to keep us asleep.
Participant: Still and all, it is interfering with the laws.
Participant: When you say about endlessness not having all the answers, Gurdjieff kind
of makes that explicit, even in terms of Ashiata Shiemash, because when Ashiata Shiemash
comes as a Messenger from his endlessness, he still has to prepare a plan. He doesn’t
arrive knowing what he was going to do. He is described sitting for forty days and forty
nights etc., to prepare what message he will bring to the three-brained beings. So there is
definitely no pre-planned solution because even Ashiata Shiemash has to figure out what
needs to be done.
Keith: Yes, and there is the additional reference to the other sacred Messengers that have
been sent over time periodically to try to assist in the dilemma. Yes, that is very plain. He
also emphasizes the fact that Ashiata’s mission fails in pretty short order so that raises some
totally different questions that we could go into but I think more essentially here is how
can we try to understand the notion at the very end of The Tales.

51
Participant: It is an organ that will cause people to not have their strong egoism. The
result will be that people will not have their negative egoism anymore.
Participant: But the negative egoism is necessary for the experiment, for endlessness’
creation to fulfill the requirements of itself to have every possible outcome.
Participant: The Tales say that Askokin was needed and then the Kundabuffer experiment
caused the egoism to develop in a bad way. So it was an error so this would compensate
for the error and get people to be more natural, more normal and then they would grow
up developing properly rather than the problem.
Participant: I thought the proposed new organ was to remind the person of their
impending death but not about egoism. That might be a result of it but it was to remind
you that you were going to die.
Participant: You’ve got it and then there are a few more sentences saying only then
will we be able to eradicate the consequences of Kundabuffer, something like that.
Participant: Did you see that as an application of a technology, upon something that
has evolved naturally?
Participant: I completely see it that way. I see that we are building that organ. We
are right now, right here. The Work is doing what the end in sight is talking about.
Participant: Are you going to implant a computer chip? [laughter]
Participant: I am talking about an inner organ of perception, an inner development.
“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 these un-
fortunates 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.” 8
Keith: Remember that it is the angelic powers that somehow or other implant Kundabuffer.
It is angelic power, the High Commission so if we are going to talk about implanting an
organ like Kundabuffer, we have that as something to consider also. What then are the
angelic powers?
Participant: It is incredibly paradoxical that the very thing which he is revolting about,
especially in the chapter “France,” is the very thing that he is going to suggest: “an organ
like Kundabuffer.” Arch strange.

8 Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales, p 1183.

52
Participant: The “like” part is saying that it’s something that is an organ; it is a
compensation. It’s not going to be like Kundabuffer. It does something different.
Kundabuffer was an organ.
Participant: But still there is this interference and the High Commission felt fully
justified; their conscience was clear. And here is Beelzebub saying the very same thing.
Participant: But it had a different purpose.
Participant: But then is the implantation of the organ like Kundabuffer is something
that we implant within ourselves intentionally and that is what makes it different?
Participant: Yes, that is the only way I can make sense of it and yet he does not say that
they will implant it themselves, he says this will be implanted in them so we can’t pretend
he didn’t say that.
Participant: Are you objecting to the fact that it is an artificial thing of imposing it or
are you objecting that Kundabuffer retarded consciousness that possibly humanity couldn’t
bear facing what their real purpose was, whereas the new proposed implantation is to
expand awareness to include mortality and the mortality of others.
Participant: I apologize for implying that there is an objection because isn’t there in an
objection simply a question? It seems strange to me. In the chapter “France” he asks why
didn’t they see this would happen? Why did they put this organ in there? My question is, is
there significance that at the very end of The Tales, Beelzebub himself is also going to say,
“we should put in an organ.” It will be a completely different organ but we will still implant
it. Isn’t that strange?
Participant: Maybe the implantation would be coming from Above because we asked for
it. If I am asking Lord Have Mercy; if I am asking for help, is that where the implantation
would be?
Participant: I completely agree with you but I still think that fact he wrote it this way
raises a question. I can say he meant this or he meant that, but it still raises a question.
Participant: There is one more complexity this brings up which is that their reason for
putting in Kundabuffer was so that they wouldn’t kill themselves. And now he wants to
remind them that they are going to die. How is that going to work?
Participant: Just a play on words–there is no contradiction–so they won’t kill themselves
and now they have to be reminded they will die.
Participant: To eradicate egoism.
Participant: I don’t see the contradiction in killing.
Participant: Suicide is egoistical. It is intentional, whereas knowing you are going to
die is not necessarily that.
Participant: It produces compassion and empathy and therefore dissolving of egoism.
You can verify it.
Keith: I think we are left many questions, good questions but it is time to say good night.

53
October Gathering 2016 ~ Saturday Morning, first session

Reading: from George Adie, A Gurdjieff Pupil in Australia, pages 388-89,

“Creating Sun in Myself:”
Doing is possible for us. So often it is repeated in the work that we
cannot do, but we also need to remember that we can do–we have to!
This work of attention is our doing. Our doing is not external – that is all
nonsense. The only doing for us is inner doing. I have spoken before about
creating sun within myself: the experience of an affirmative, positive and
intelligent element within myself. This is our aim this is our doing, to create
sun within ourselves. We come to learn and practice, to be able to do just
this. It sounds beautiful, even poetic, but it must be very much more. We
have not sufficiently realized that I can and must observe my state, and
change my state.
We already possess this vital power–the power to change our state. This
is our work, to consciously observe my state and to remain present, con-
sciously experiencing the change of my state. So, when I experience, in a
moment, the conviction of this possibility, it becomes crystallised in me. I
call it the crystal ‘I can change my state’, and then, there is another crystal,
‘I ONLY can change my state’. We need to try to jump from one stream to
another. I endeavour to divide the life-force of my attention to that I accept
this life in the so-called normal stream, am aware of myself as participating
in this normal level. At the same time, this awareness, for the extent of its
duration, allows us to participate also in the conscious life of the higher
realm. This effort brings us into touch with this higher realm, with its life
and its vivid impressions. We touch this by consciously experiencing the
impression of I AM, the being-reality. It has to be there many times, for
each single flash puts down a particle of the substance which will be cry-
stallised. My state will inevitably change, and I can be present to these
changes, in a flash. If I am conscious as my state changes, I learn how the
panoply operates, and how a beam of my attention can affect the processes
as they are occurring. Something arises within me: I can in fact appear
within myself and manifest myself to myself, in the sun of my being. My
presence is illuminated.

Reading: from G.I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales, pages 1105-06:

“I first learned that the destiny of beings arising on this planet of yours
is chiefly to elaborate – by means of the process of their existence – the
vibrations required by Nature for the maintenance of those former parts of
the planet now called Moon and Anulios, when, do you remember, I became
worthy personally to converse for the second time with His Conformity the
then still Angel, but now Archangel, Looisos.
“His Conformity then told me that although the movements of both for-
mer parts of the planet Earth were now already finally regulated with the

54
 general harmony of movement and that every kind of apprehension of some
or other surprise in the near future had absolutely vanished, yet to avoid any
possible complications in the distant future it had been explicitly decided
by the Most High, Most Sacred Individuals to actualize the ‘corresponding’
on the planet for the formation of what is called the Sacred Askokin so that
this sacred cosmic substance, required for the maintenance of that planet’s
former parts, might continuously issue from that planet.
“And further, His Highness also explained that this cosmic substance, the
Sacred Askokin, exists in general in the Universe chiefly blended with the
sacred substances ‘Abrustdonis’ and ‘Helkdonis,’ and hence that this sacred
substance Askokin in order to become vivifying for such a maintenance must
first be freed from the said sacred substance Abrustdonis and Helkdonis.
“To tell the truth, my boy, I did not at once clearly understand all that he
then said, and it was only later that I came to understand it all clearly, when,
during my studies of the fundamental cosmic laws, I learned that these
sacred substances Abrustdonis and Helkdonis are just those substances by
which the higher being-bodies of three-brained beings, namely, the body
Kesdjan and the body of the Soul, are in general formed and perfected;
and when I learned that the separation of the sacred Askokin from the said
sacred substances proceeds in general when the beings on whatever planet it
might be transubstantiate the sacred substances Abrustdonis and Helkdonis
in themselves for the forming and perfecting of their higher bodies, by
means of conscious labors and intentional sufferings.

Keith: I think it would be useful if we shared impressions and tried to discuss these two
terms: Abrustdonis and Helkdonis, since we use them and we all have our own kind of
understanding of what’s being inferred but I think it would be useful to go into that.
How you appreciate the word Abrustdonis? What do you think it is, what is Abrustdonis?
Participant: Could Abrustdonis relate to conscious labor, since in what was just read we
find that substances can create within us Higher Being-bodies, so would Abrustdonis and
Helkdonis have a relationship with conscious labor and intentional suffering?
Keith: Put just the way you did, yes, it certainly seems so. When you put both conscious
labor and intentional suffering with Abrustdonis and Helkdonis, that certainly seems to be
what Gurdjieff’s intent was. The focus is now on Abrustdonis. What precisely is Abrustdonis?
Participant: Do you think it has anything to do with the food of air because it’s about the
only other substance that he speaks about that feeds the second being-body? I wonder if it
has some relationship with the food of air because he says to ‘transubstantiate’ the substance
in ourselves. Could it possibly be related to that?
Keith: Well, in the octave of Air, on the illustration, if it is possible to pass the mi-fa of Air,
that means you would be going from mi 48 to fa 24.
As I understand this, when you pass from the mass-based world of 768–384–192–92 to 48,
between 92 and 48, we come to the end of what I call mass-based biochemistry or physiology,
in other words at this point, we are beginning to deal less and less with molecules and atoms
and more with electromagnetic phenomena of one kind or another.

55
 Simultaneities of the Triads of Law, Food, Air, Impressions Octave
H12 category H 6 category
photonic powers of Will
Attention GRACE Higher Emotion
Intentional absorption o nd conscious shock Higher Intellect
of higher being-foods sec
simultaneity simultaneity
MI FA
132 231
12 6

SOL LA
H24 category 213 312
12 FOOD

hi
simultaneity 6

gh
DO
768

er
EM SI
321 RE H6
phenomena 12 123
384 simultaneity
sensory
images of RE SOL
123 FA SI 213
both inner 24 231 321 6
24 LA MI 6
psychic and outer 312 132
24 192
and worlds
ck

de
spiritual
us sho

life of non-mass-

grees
man based-ionic
waveforms DO
scio

A IR

of
sensory 192
DO SOL FA
n

input 213 231

Re
co

48 48 96

as
H48 category
IMP R E SSI ON S

on
simultaneity
t
rs

MI RE
fi

“serves active 132 123

48 96 “FA96 – SOL48
physical and serves physical/passive
brained structural aspects”
functioning”
SI LA
321 312 “biochemical
6 6
source of feeling
energies”

When we finally enter wholly into the functioning nervous system, the first thing that
most of us are aware of, in terms of the brain, is that this is how we see, smell, hear, taste
and touch. So our senses be-come our first way of understanding the transition from the
mass-based world – the world ‘out there’ that I can touch and so forth – and how it presents
itself to me – inside.
So what I see, or touch or smell is an image. What I am proposing is that all 24s, the
whole of that category of ‘hydrogen’ 24, whether it is in the physical Food Octave, the Air
Octave or the Impressions Octave, what we are dealing with are images–images that are
created by some or another part of the brain or the central nervous system.
If you follow the air octave from mi 48, where we begin to see the emerging of a neural
system, of neural impulses within the nervous system–interesting, such a challenging notion
that nature faced here, just in looking at how does a nerve impulse get generated. And
it does so by specifically and in a very highly controlled fashion it controls – doesn’t delve
directly into the atomic world but it uses non-massed-based phenomena, namely, an ionic
impulse. They haven’t transformed themselves into anything else, they have simply moved
inside-outside, outside-inside.

IONIC IMPULSE Axon Membrane

56
 However, there is a very small–so small that we could not be aware of the difference–
but there is a small difference in charge between the sodium ion and the potassium ion.
Remember that all ions have in their electron shell an un-equal number of electrons, and
that gives the whole atom itself a certain charge, a certain ability to either interact or not
interact with other charges, to be attracted toward or attract something toward it. In any
case, that difference in charge, which is minuscule, now moves from the inside to the
outside or the outside to the inside. But this is so cleverly arranged that there is a sodium-
potassium here and here–lined up throughout the whole length of the nerve fiber. And now
at one end we suddenly kick off the sodium-potassium transfer and that little microscopic
charge suddenly appears right there, but its right next door to an imbalance, in other words
to the sodium and potassium as they were before the first one moved this way. And that
imbalance triggers the same phenomena in the sodium-potassium next to it and next to it.
So now with the switching of sodium and potassium in these two directions, you have now
a tiny, tiny little charge that’s moving along the nerve fiber.
The nerve fiber stays the same, the sodiums and potassiums stay the same, the mass-
based world doesn’t change–it’s still the sodiums and potassiums, all the proteins and all the
linings of the nerve fiber–they’re still the same. The only thing that’s different is this charge
that has moved. That charge is the neural impulse. That neural impulse is the basis of this
multi-billion-celled transfer of impulses through central nervous systems through the whole
of the brain and the peripheral nervous system. It’s all based on what we just went over–all
based on this moving charge, this sodium-potassium pump.
And it’s all non-mass; there are no electrons or molecules involved. This is the transition
that I put, in terms of hydrogen numbers, between 96 and 48. It’s right in that ‘in-between’
that we see this begin to happen, this exploratory, creative imagination on the part of nature
that finally evolves from cell structures that have been there for billions of years before.
There have been these charges on these atoms for billions of years before, but gradually,
gradually the mass-based world of Tetartocosmos–this is Gurdjieff’s going from Microcosmos
to finally getting to a multi-celled living creature, and we have lots of those still around with
us, mussels and clams and all kinds of non-brained life forms; we have buckets of them. You
can explore them and see aspects of this development of the neural possibilities: a little bit,
and it goes no further and a little bit, and it goes no further. There are all of these charges
that begin to develop on the external aspect of cells for instance, so you’ve got a cell next
to another cell next to another cell and they begin to develop.
This is what Tetartocosmos really means; it’s the fourth cosmos. They begin to talk to
each other; these cells are now bound together. From one cell, the one cell begins to live
with another cell begins to live with another cell and they begin to help each other. They
feed each other; they defend each other, so they have to communicate. How do they commu-
nicate? And you see the beginning of possibilities there of using charge to communicate, to
send messages back and forth.
Participant: It was said that it is non-mass-based but it’s not mass-based but it uses the
mass world.
Keith: Yes, exactly.
Participant: Why do you say it is non-mass-based when these sodium and potassium
particles are interacting?

57
Keith: By the time you get into the neural impulse, you’re purely in a world of non-mass.
There is no mass involved in a neural impulse itself.
Participant: Because we don’t see anything move from one trigger to the next?
Keith: No, we can measure the change in charge but there is no evidence that a molecule
or electron has taken part in that transfer. The transfer of energy in the nerve impulse has
taken place totally by way of the impulse. But it has made use of a characteristic of the world
of mass, which is that masses have charges. So by lining up the charges in a certain way, in
other words, the sodium-potassium switching, it takes that tiny little charge and lines it up
to make use of it.
Just imagine, when I was talking about Tetartocosmos, when you have a whole bunch
of cells living together and growing more and more and more cells in this, they have to
have ways of communicating needs and opportunities and possibilities, dangers, feeding
etc, all those things that have to do with the wholeness of the life form. So they begin to
communicate increasingly but they begin to make use of charges, in one way or another.
Before there are neural nets, before there is neural transmission, there is charge-sharing
between cells. We still have it in us. We have many things that are shared within our own
selves that don’t involve the nervous system, but they do involve electromagnetic wave
charges between cells. So it’s still very much a part of us.
Participant: Thinking of Abrustdonis and Helkdonis and the example I gave yesterday
where, years ago, I shared an impression at a meeting where after years of living out of a
backpack and having nothing but what was on my back, then getting married and having
to deal with all my wife’s stuff; moving it around, and that event where I threw a table.
And I remember you said that at that time that “You are now under an obligation to, each
time, treat those things with care.” So even to this day, when I see a shoe or some clothes
or something hanging about, it seems that that is an impression coming in; it makes no
difference whether it is the shoe or whatever, but I see something, and it triggers that
memory and it almost seems that the impression comes in and the metabolic moment
of digesting that an impression is like a sensation, so thinking of that in terms of Abrustdonis,
that I have this sensation and then right on the heels of that I immediately remember the
negative emotion that existed way back when I ‘lost it’. And the opportunity in that moment
seems like there’s first that impression – the sensation that one gets from digesting that
impression, and then there’s the immediate opportunity to work on not expressing that same
negative emotion. Then actually taking the shoe or the sweater or whatever it is and folding
it nicely and putting it aside. Is that the memory you were just talking about there, when
that movement, is that those cells?
Keith: What you’ve just spoken out is a perfect example of Abrustdonis. You see the kernel.
This is happening when Gurdjieff is talking about Abrustdonis. It is the emotional wholeness,
realness, of a particular experience, that part of the experience that has to do essentially
with the world of self-other, that has to do with the world of relationship in some one way
or another. How many ways? Thousands of different ways that it enters into our life, into
your life in that situation there. But in other people it may be the feeling that they heard last
night that their friend’s husband just died. And your immediate response is ‘what can I do
to help this poor woman who just lost her husband?’ Or, help somebody who has been in an
automobile accident.

58
 We can go through an infinity of events, of experiencings and see how–not always, but
very often – there are aspects of it that have to do with the world of right relationship, of
responsible relationship between oneself and some aspect of the world out there. To the
degree that we see that, that we respond to that, that we make an effort to be a force into
that world, that is conscious labor and intentional suffering. We suffer because you are
reminded of this, when you were a jackass, how many times? A million times in a lifetime,
you get reminded of, boy, I really blew it. And we never quite escape totally from it. We’re
always responsible for those circumstances. They can always be reminders that open into
this world of real emotion, of higher emotion.
Yes, this is a way of seeing Abrustdonis. But in many many events when Gurdjieff talks
about Askokin, he’s talking about the totality of everything in the river; the river is flowing
by and there are fish abundantly to be chosen but you don’t have to choose all of them, you
have to choose some. Well, some of them have a clear connection into this world of self-
other, some have a connection into understanding process, understanding law and then
there is not so much, or any at all of an emotional content to it. It is more like Einstein
wondering, “Hmm, how does that happen?” then putting all of his energy and insight into
trying to figure out how things happen. Well, when we were in that mode, we were not
so much in the world of feeling, we are starting from the world of mental apparatus, the
thinking apparatus, so then our pursuit is more toward higher reason. Then we are in the
third octave; that’s Helkdonis, ‘help-for-God’.
There is an inference here that goes back to last evening when we were talking. Help
-for-God, in endlessness’ final question of Beelzebub, “What can be done?” The inference
for me is that endlessness has the question, that endlessness does not know the answer
to. endlessness now is depending on one of his premier, one of his great beloved sons,
whom he has exiled, whom he has sent as a representative to discover how these things really
work down there, how come all these things happen, how these terrible things occur, and war
occurs…and how to stop that? What can be done about this? This is endlessness’ question.
I think we have to get over thinking, in our childishness, that endlessness is the be-all,
end-all, knows the answer to everything long before it happens and on and on. If we just
look at it realistically, why should we presume that the answer to every possibility, seeing
how complex our world is, how more and more complex it becomes the more we investigate
it, the more we see that there are an infinite number of ways in which things can go wrong,
can go other than what we anticipate them to go. Every scientific discovery, every observation
that has been made in the last 500 years has that at its nature: we open a ‘bag of worms’. We
make this discovery – whatever it happens to be – and on the other side of this discovery are
these host of questions that are inferred as a result of the discovery.
The thing that upset Einstein most was quantum mechanics. Here he was, the person
who saw into the quantum world, and he really didn’t want to accept it; he fought with it for
the rest of his life. But there it was, a question that had so many questions associated with it,
that he was frustrated by it.
Participant: Going to sleep last night I went back to that question that was there about the
implantation of another organ and just how un-natural that seemed – that’s the same mistake
again….but it’s just a suggestion, it doesn’t say it happens, it’s just that possibility of needing
another organ. It isn’t a fact anymore than the implantation of Kundabuffer.
And in terms of the admonition to read Beelzebub’s Tales three times–and the third time
is forever–but Beelzebub speaking to us, as Hassein. The organ, I thought, was already there

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because Beelzebub needs somebody to listen to the tale and for somebody to take it in, and
that’s what we have to do. The more that we take that in, then, and only then, can we fathom
the gist. So it isn’t something that happens–do we already have the organ in place, or making
the organ to do that; it is not something ‘more’, it is already there in the form of: we are
Hassein, listening to the story.
Keith: Good, I like that very much. It raises one very interesting question which you allude
to, and that is the nature of Kundabuffer to begin with. You inferred something, which is
obvious. It is great fantasy, great hypnosis when Gurdjieff tells the story about the High
Commission that comes down and sees this, that and so on and decides that it has to implant
this organ. Oh come on! Did that happen? No, of course it didn’t happen. Is there something
that emerged in the evolving history of man that suddenly showed this terrible vulnerability
to hypnosis – in all three of our parts – that we can fall under these influences and become
convinced that a flea is an elephant and on and on and on? Is there not something that
evolves because it is already there in us, as you said? The tendency may not have shown
itself 50,000 years ago, but when we see that kings, almost universally, certainly in all the
discoveries that have been made so far, that have found for instance, what did kings of old
do to celebrate their conquering of new territory, of a new city? They bragged about how
many thousands of people they killed. They bragged about it; this is a mark of a ‘great king’,
how many people they could kill. You read that and think is that really true, is that possible
that kings could do that? We say that’s so abnormal, well this is 2016; it’s abnormal in our
conception–now, but was it really that way then? Was there not a hypnotic state amongst
mankind and amongst the leaders that emerged that led to this kind of behavior? Led them
to accepting that this is the way it is: kings kill the people that they conquer, that’s all; what’s
wrong with that?
I choose to think it was there all the time; it was there as a possibility that emerged.
That tendency, that possibility began to show itself and because it had such an attractiveness
to it – hypnosis is an immensely attractive thing; the whole of The Tales is hypnotic, every
image that comes out of The Tales is a hypnotic image; they’re all imaginary, none of them
exist, and yet they have profound influences in us, just like the hypnotist who stands up on
the stage convinces me that my legs are absolutely frozen and paralyzed. Then he can pick
me up and string me out on a ladder and show that I suspend my whole body on my legs
alone without bending my knees.
Participant: Thinking about that ‘already being there’, Kundabuffer was implanted in the
base of our spine. Isn’t there an element of our reptilian brain that has that suggestibility,
that if something comes to it, it has no option but to believe what is there; you can’t question
it; the very survival is based on that.
Keith: Yes, in the sense that an image is an image. We live our lives absolutely dependent
on our external senses. The world would not be real if we did not have our five senses; we
believe our senses. But if something distorts some aspect of that, in vision, hearing, taste,
touch, smell–what happens? Do we believe it? You bet your life we do. Why? Because we
have built into us certain mechanisms that are very protective, that say: “Believe what you
sense, because it may cost you your life if you don’t.” This is there from the very earliest one-
celled beings, that they must learn very early how to recognize friend or foe, what is a danger
and what isn’t. And how do they do that? Through image, not through reality; this, we’ve got
to get over. That’s not the point, because we judge reality totally, totally in terms of image.

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And the image is something that is created inside of us; it is not real. It is real in the image.
So the nature of image formation is the vulnerability. It has to be there.
Participant: Also not having one’s own ‘I’ is the big vulnerability.
Keith: Even bigger, yes.
Participant: That’s what causes the mass-hypnosis.
Keith: It makes us infinitely vulnerable to it, yes.
Participant: I was thinking of an example of Abrustdonis and Helkdonis. Someone yes-
terday reminded us of how Gurdjieff sat in the café and wrote, and I remember reading
that he said that it gave him an opportunity to see all the people, and the love that he felt
for these people is what drove him in his writing. The story reminded me that this conscious
labor and intentional suffering, the conscious labor of observing people, and feeling and
suffering for people, and loving them.
Keith: Yes, but seeing the traps that they were in.
Participant: So that, I was thinking, could be that Abrustdonis; and the Helkdonis was
in his writing, is ‘help-for-God’.
Participant: Maybe Abrustdonis is formed from the emanations from the solar system,
and the Helkdonis is to do with the emanations from the Sun-Absolute because that would
correspond with the different bodies and it would also make sense in terms of the solar
emanations to do with our emotional states and the emanations from endlessness would
have to do with the Reason. So, when as three-brained beings we can work with those
energies, we can develop them and live in those worlds, like Zeke’s reminding factor. It’s
a solar, reminding factor. It can lift him up into what you could call the solar world, or the
emotional world, be awake in that world. And then when we could work with Helkdonis,
as was said, Gurdjieff is working directly with something from emanations from his
endlessness. Where Askokin is also made up of Abrustdonis and Helkdonis – has that
within it – so at some point it must be a created substance, so it must be created partly by
solar emanations and partly by emanations from his endlessness. Those substances are
then released, and we live in that world that they are released into, somehow.
Keith: A useful reference here is the 1931 manuscript of Beelzebub’s Tales where in the
“Purgatory” chapter Gurdjieff changes this from the 1950 edition. It doesn’t appear. But
in the ’31 edition, it is endlessness – World One – that provides the reconciling force for
each individual sun. This gives to each sun, then, a way of being an enabler or participant
in the process, since all of us are created from the level of the sun. We are, in the lateral
octave, all outflow of that conscious intention/manifestation of the sun, which is solar. But
when we realize that the reconciling force in that, comes from World One, we have a way of
connecting up with what you just said, that it is really possible to come under the influence
of World One, directly from the Will, because of the way in which the Worlds are made. This
is one way to understand that very confusing (because it’s so inexplicable) triad of law that
Bennett that says is the highest, standing at point eight in the enneagramatic sequence of the
Six Laws, and that is the law of Grace, which requires the entry of World One–requires grace
to enter directly into the physical world. This is impossible, and Bennett talks about this in
a marvelously interesting way.

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Participant: So remember that little book, Hazard, that Bennett wrote? When I got to the
end of it, I always had the feeling that hazard was God and so that would go along with the
idea that endlessness doesn’t know all the answers. But then you just relieved that problem
by having God, or endlessness, or the Reconciling Force coming from World One. That
solves that problem but it keeps it dynamic and moving.
Keith: Right, it also brings us back to where we started relative to answering endlessness’
question of Hassein. In other words, if what is to be done is the implantation of an organ like
Kundabuffer, we’ve come a long distance in discussion about the nature of Kundabuffer, the
nature of image, the nature of hypnosis, the biology of all of this to some degree.
Now I think we are looking in a much more realistic way. If this organ is in its incipient-
ness, if it is already here, this new organ, just “like” Kundabuffer was already there and it
unfolded into the monstrous difficult circumstance that it became, is Gurdjieff inferring
that the same thing is true of this new organ, like Kundabuffer, like, in the sense, that it
is part of us already and what we have to do is to allow it to grow through Abrustdonis/
Helkdonis – through growing, feeding the Kesdjan and Higher Being-bodies and then that
flows out into the world through individuals, small groups – whatever, that’s not the point.
Kundabuffer works in small, large or massive groups. This works the same; it is something
that is intrinsically possible and powerful as an influence and we simply have to plumb it
more and more through Abrustdonis/Helkdonis – conscious labor and intentional suffering.
But it is already there.
If you choose to think of it that way it can be a very powerful instrument because then
we don’t have to be in a state of inner conflict about what does this mean? No, what it means
is that we have to increasingly recognize the power of its already being here and that we can
see in a group like this or in our everyday lives where we go back to. The influence may be
tiny but so is the influence of Kundabuffer in my ignorance or stupidity or identification in
a given circumstance with my family or with my community or whatever my work is, I bring
that influence into it. It is bringing that influence in whatever way your path in life involves
you. If that’s with a large group and an active work group and if it isn’t that, and some of
us live a more solitary circumstance where we don’t have a constant group that we are in
constant relationship with – it’s a much more off and on difficult situation. But it doesn’t mat-
ter whether it’s individual group, small group – it’s always there as a possibility.
Participant: Conversely, there is a certain apathy that can be justified, “well, the organ
hasn’t been implanted yet so why try?”
Keith: True.
Participant: I heard something in this reading that I hadn’t noticed before. There must be
more than one passage where he talks about Abrustdonis and Helkdonis and I don’t know
where this falls in the sequence of those passages but I think what was said by the angel was
to separate Askokin from Abrustdonis/Helkdonis and not the other way around. One could
say this is the point of view of the angel wanting to keep the sacred order of the Universe
flowing and his ‘hot button’ is not Abrustdonis and Helkdonis at all.
Keith: That’s right.
Participant: But what does it mean to separate Askokin from the other two rather than
the other direction?

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Keith: Good point.
Participant: Doesn’t he say that by the separating of those two parts the Askokin in
vivified? And so the point of that would be a different quality of influence
that moves to complete the octave to the Moon and Anulios.
Participant: So what is Askokin?
Participant: If we put it in the context that Keith does as experience, then that’s quality
of experience entering into the so-called lower worlds that is of a more vivified nature.
Participant: What is an example of that?
Participant: Zeke paying attention to his wife’s sweater.
Participant: Of the release of Askokin?
Participant: Yes, it seems like the emphasis is on what can Askokin do for the completion
of the Great Ray.
Participant: The maintenance
Participant: Yes.
Participant: One the things I take from Gurdjieff’s creation myth is that when those laws
get changed, all of my prior imaginings of worlds that exist in the absence of materiality is
undercut because he essentially says in that myth that the whole of Creation has a material
component. So, in all the examples we give, for instance of the neural impulse, prove to
me that a neural impulse exists in the absence of an underlying material nature, or prove
to me that magnetic fields exist in the absence of an underlying material nature. So that
material nature is part of the Megalocosmos, that’s part of his Creation myth. To vivify that,
or to increase the quality of experience of the underlying material world is to influence that
materiality and it requires a relationship with that materiality and a responsibility towards
that materiality, which, in that imagery, is the materiality of our ordinary emotions.
Participant: So that’s our action in life.
Participant: Yes, it is the action of that effort as a vivifying quality of experience in our
emotions, in our ordinary emotions and in our ordinary physical presence and in those things
we choose assuming someday we decide we have that level of intentionality in our Reason,
those material things we invest ourselves in because in all the possibilities of our lives, we can
have the question what is happening for me in the materiality of my life that could be vivified
to the quality of my experiencing ? How do I choose to spend my time ? And in what do I
choose to invest myself in, in that time?

Participant: I am not satisfied with this because it keeps drifting in the direction of
Abrustdonis and Helkdonis instead of what is Askokin doing for the continuation of the
Great Ray’s process and why would the angel be interested in that and what is expected?
And does the Askokin flow whether there is Abrustdonis and Helkdonis extracted from it
or not? It seems to me that is does flow and I wonder if we have a more concrete way of
describing what Askokin is.

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Participant: Would it useful to see it as free attention?
Participant: I will just suggest that I think it is the life force, “Chi,” something to do with
that, that force of energy which is not well understood by science and keeps things going.
Participant: I think we have to come to terms with the possibility that we accept that it
always flows if we are going to apply the concept of experience to the whole of the cosmos in
terms of saying that consciousness exists in the multiple levels etc., but then in our particular
circumstance, our particular Lateral Octave, in our particular three-brained dilemma, that
that continuation is not guaranteed. That’s the dramatic Universe or the dramatic Lateral
Octave. So the flow of that experience is a result and the result of that may be possibility.
Participant: Is the vivifying the extraction of Askokin from Abrustdonis and Helkdonis?
Keith: Why persist in making this an up or a down thing? The Ray is the Ray. The Ray has
an involutional flow and an evolutional flow. The absolute absence of Reason is what he calls
“firm-calm.” At the other end of this is the absolute Reason of endlessness. But the same
thing is true. You cannot have a Universe if we look at it from the Ray of Creation from the
top where we have World One, World Three and World Six and most of us has this visual
image of this enormously great energy and power that creates the world and it comes into
being. But it’s really not like that. There has to be something that moves up. If this is moving
down; if this is all an involutional flow, then in our Universe, there has to be … and I think
this is one of the great pluses of modern physics is that they infer the appearance of mass as
a major qualifier of the entire history of the cosmos – the early appearance of mass. It is not
unfolding, it suddenly appears.
Gurdjieff says the same thing. There are these like two circles, in this one place he says
very clearly we have to keep in mind that, in the circles, involution and evolution are going on
simultaneously and that the triad of evolution has to begin at the lowest point. The lowest
point would be absolute firm-calm. Absolute firm-calm must appear at the beginning of the
whole thing so the Ray moves in both directions. It moves in an evolutional direction, there
is a striving on the part of that first appearance of mass, a striving from then on the return,
to return to this, in other words, to evolve.
There are so many beautiful stories in the history of physics and biology that show that in
this elemental presence of charge the difference between the electron charge and the charge
within the atom how in their studies now of what happening in the first five hundred million
years (which seems such an outrageous kind of thing to say because they are pointing to this
first five hundred million years as if it were a very brief period of time) but that is called the
time of the dark Universe, dark because there is so much energy that every photon that is
part of the effulgent, involutional flow of enormously high gamma level energy flow, that
there are so many sub-atomic particles, there is so much stuff that is there, that the photons
keep bumping into something. They cannot travel any distance before they are absorbed or
transmuted or enter into something or bump off or bounce off and so forth.
So thinking of this condensed beginning of our Universe where things are incredibly,
unbelievably compact such that light cannot move outside of itself, it is going to be dark
because the light can’t go anywhere; it is all trapped inside. But the evolving Universe
is growing; it is expanding. As the temperature comes down as we go lower and lower in
the high energy, then we reach a point where, suddenly, enough space appears between
elements that are going to become the atoms, become the mass. But here they are quarks

64
and gluons and all kinds of subatomic bits and pieces. They are still not yet coalesced. Why?
Because there is too much energy; they are still in this state of vibration and motion.
But at this moment, four hundred billion light years ago, when enough distance appears
that light can escape, then we enter the age of a lighted Universe, of a Universe in which
light will show itself. I can’t go into all the complexities of it but you have all seen pictures
in major newspaper or magazines of the microwave anisotropy that shows how the Universe
looked 14 billion years ago. What they are looking at then is the world of the Universe as it
was it was emerging into a clearly differentiated beginning coagulations of mass and energy
and light.
It’s evolving. Once the proton and neutron coalesce from these elements, the quarks
and gluons I mentioned before, now we have atoms incipient molecules even at that early
stage, at least we have those where two hydrogen nuclei, two protons will combine and we
begin to see the inference of that combination into building the entirety of the atomic table.
But building the atomic table is going to take another several hundred billion years before
the temperatures and pressures become low enough that things can stick together in a much
more long-term sort of way. The point is that firm-calm has to be there, that this absolute
condensation of mass has to be there at the very beginning of our Universe as we understand
it, along with the light. So we’ve got the involutional and evolutional circles, enneagram
going on at the same time.
In other contexts, Gurdjieff said a great deal about the moon and how to make moon.
We have to assist the moon in its evolution and this is our task, relative to sensing the body.
When you sense your body and it’s an intentional act, as it was in the exercise this morning,
we are doing something with intention that is totally unnecessary as a human being. In our
typical, sleep state, second state of consciousness, we could do quite well without having to
sense your body. You will sense it when it’s in trouble, when there is an alarm system that sets
off something that will send messages to your brain or pain centers and then you will react to
that. Fine. But to do that intentionally, to simply do it because you can do it? Don’t you see
there is nothing in our nervous system that is built to do that? What kind of nerves are you
going to move over; how are you going to determine the direction where you sense your leg?
If the origin has got to be out here, that when I touch my knee or when my foot becomes
cold because of its exposure to something that’s cold and I say my foot feels cold or I feel
my knee, I have come to that discovery on the basis of input that had its origin out there.
When you sense your foot or knee, it’s not like that. You are starting something that starts
from upstairs, from the brain and moves out. There are no nerves to do that. We don’t grow
nerves that have an efferent, that have a solitary pathway so that you can sense your body in
that way. It simply doesn’t exist. So puzzle on that. Think on that. How do I sense my foot?
If I am dependent and my shoe if it’s not fitting properly and it’s pushing on the side of my
foot and I feel uncomfortable I say, yes, my foot hurts because the shoe is ill fitting.
Participant: You asked for examples or impressions of Abrustdonis. I am getting the
impression is that it is on this diagram. [next page]
When I hear I have to feed the moon, I understand it to be that I have to constantly
be present in my body. Something develops through the repetition of the do48, conscious
shock and it is only after I’ve repeated, it has to do with self and other. My normal I is pretty
much gone but not totally and a freedom of I is present, Higher Emotional Center has

65
been fed. It happens where there are people around repeating these efforts and there are
moments of concern for other that kicks in in a way that is not from my thinking about it
rather than as a practice.

Second Conscious Shock

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24 FA LA MI SI
Third

24 24 192 6
Higher

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First 48 96
Conscious
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Mechanical Feeling and Sensation
(External Senses, Endocrine System and Oxygen)

Keith: One of the blessings of being together.

Participant: About the ‘12s’ being the Abrustdonis and Helkdonis, it might be the ‘6s.’
Keith: I don’t think it’s categorical. Zeke’s experience is clearly associated with Abrustdonis 
– of seeing the emotional significance of other and how we must be open to recognizing that
and how reminiscently we are brought back to that moment again and again. But there are a
billion other possibilities for that kind of relational question to occur in life.
Participant: Those ‘6s’ definitely feed higher parts so Beelzebub’s Tales was talking about
extracting those for the purpose of building those higher parts and if that’s true then you are
missing do6 on the diagram which could be possibly visualized as this Askokin.
Keith: So far as the Askokin it’s also possible to see that this is how we meet the obligation
which we have down as well as up. If our aspirations are all to build Kesdjan and Higher
Being-body and we are all the time looking to move up, then Gurdjieff asks us to raise this
question of what obligation do we have individually and collectively to the down side, In
other words, when he speaks about Moon and creating Moon in oneself, I believe he
is talking about that we owe a debt.
We have an obligation to assist in the world of increasing concreteness that is not
conscious to become conscious. When we sense the body, we are contributing to that
circumstance. The body becomes more conscious. It moves away from the firm-calm of
absolute lack of Reason and it begins to become more sensitive to itself–the physical body
this mindless thing out here – that’s Moon in Gurdjieff’s terms. And we must assist it to

66
grow more conscious. When we do that then we are taking the everyday experience of
living in a physical body and we are contributing to its increasing consciousness.
Participant: I would say that that is an “attention body” that you are developing, not so
much that your physical body becomes different, it does, but the attention body becomes
available to the consciousness.
Participant: As on page 78 of Beelzebub’s Tales:
“So in the meantime, exist as you exist. Only do not forget one thing,
namely, at your age it is indispensably necessary that every day, at sunrise,
while watching the reflection of its splendor, you bring about a contact
between your consciousness and the various unconscious parts of your
general presence. Try to make this state last and to convince the unconscious
parts – [not] as if they were conscious – that if they hinder your general
functioning, they, in the period of your responsible age, not only cannot
fulfill the good that befits them, but your general presence of which they
are part, will not be able to be a good servant of our common endless
creator and by that will not even be worthy to pay for your arising and
existence.
Participant: The engagement with our physical body, creating our Moon, that was the
Askokin itself, separate from Abrustdonis and Helkdonis, that’s coming back to the question
of what is Askokin separated out.
Keith: All of the mechanical actions of our three-brain-ness, everything that occurs in the
green circle that is enclosed here. Now there are aspects of that that have to do with thinking
because we have our mindlessness in thinking, we have our formatory apparatus, we have
all of our mechanical automatic emotional responses to things – I am talking about those
things as well. As Gurdjieff says, we have an obligation to that; we have an obligation to that
world of mindlessness, of identification – to help it become more conscious and sensing is
one of the ways in which we can do that. Remember he said you build something, something
appears in the exterior, we begin to develop an atmosphere. He talks about the atmosphere
of the Moon; he talks about building an atmosphere through sensing of your body so that the
body itself becomes more sensitive. I could believe that, certainly.
Participant: Would it be helpful to look at this question of Askokin also from the per-
spective of influences, B and C influences? As an image, the sweater [of my wife] if I am
there in that moment, the sweater could act for me as a B influence to connect to something
higher or could very well go down; it could just become a very light mechanical influence
where I idolize the sweater or my car because it is “holy.” That can act as a B influence
just as in the life of culture such as the cathedrals – Chartres could be collectively a B in-
fluence that could allow us to separate something out from those images if we are present
to them. Could Askokin be looked at as an influence?
Keith: Yes. Why not?

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October Gathering 2016 ~ Saturday Morning, second session

Participant: [referring to the High Commission’s reasons for the implantation of the organ
Kundabuffer] …every kind of apprehension and surprise was absolutely vanished and yet
they went ahead to avoid any possible complication.
Keith: Who is speaking there?
Participant: Beelzebub is speaking:
“His Conformity then told me that although the movements of both
former parts of the planet Earth were now already finally regulated with the
general harmony of movement and that every kind of apprehension of some
or other surprise in the near future had absolutely vanished, yet to avoid any
possible complications in the distant future it had been explicitly decided
by the Most High, Most Sacred Individuals to actualize the ‘corresponding’
on the planet for the formation of what is called the Sacred Askokin so that
this sacred cosmic substance, required for the maintenance of that planet’s
former parts, might continuously issue from that planet.1
Keith: Those are the words of the angels, not Beelzebub. He is saying what the angels said
to him. And it’s just the damn angels all over again. The screw-up is in the angelic world.
Participant: This is just a noticing. It seems Askokin first needs to be extracted so when
I was reading that it seemed to imply that the debt of our existence towards the vivifying
force, conscious or unconscious comes before our ability to use the other two sacred sub-
stances. It seems there is a material debt.
“… this sacred substance Askokin in order to become vivifying for such a
maintenance must first be freed from the said sacred substance Abrustdonis
and Helkdonis.”2
It seems there is an indication of a process that that had to happen first.
Keith: Who is speaking there?
Participant: Beelzebub is speaking.
Keith: What is the context of what he is speaking about?
Participant: He is saying His Conformity then told me.
Keith: Ah! There is the damn angel again.
“To tell the truth, my boy, I did not at once clearly understand all that he
then said, and it was only later that I came to understand it all clearly, when,
during my studies of the fundamental cosmic laws, I learned that these
sacred substances Abrustdonis and Helkdonis are just those substances by
which the higher being-bodies of three-brained beings, namely, the body

1 Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales, pp 1105-06

2 Ibid.

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 Kesdjan and the body of the Soul, are in general formed and perfected;
and when I learned that the separation of the sacred Askokin from the
said sacred substances proceeds in general when the beings on whatever
planet it might be transubstantiate the sacred substances Abrustdonis
and Helkdonis in themselves for the forming and perfecting of their
higher bodies, by means of conscious labors and intentional sufferings.3
Participant: He is implying that he came to see it for himself that this was the truth,
that you had to get Askokin out before you could use Abrustdonis and Helkdonis.
Keith: That’s Looisos. That is the angel speaking.
Participant: Yes, that is the angel speaking but then it says Beelzebub saw it for himself.
Keith: No, then Beelzebub went to work on it as he goes to work on so many other things
that the angelic forces have brought down. He has a lot to say about the criminal unfore-
seeingness of the implantation of Kundabuffer so I think this is another instance like that.
The first statement (and this is second we have discussed) is Beelzebub speaking in the
words of the angel; it is the angel we have to hold to the fire relative to what it implies.
From an angelic point of view, Looisos’ point of view, it is perfectly reasonable to place
Askokin at a higher level than the ‘incidental’ Abrustdonis and Helkdonis because that is
the downward flow of involution.
Participant: He needs it. If you don’t get it the thing is going to go off and …?
Keith: Right, they might do something really weird, like become conscious and we don’t
want that. See there is delightful background play that Gurdjieff does so beautifully here of
man vs. the angelic world. This is the Conference of the Birds and the whole bunch of things
that he’s got wrapped up in this tension between higher power looking down in an involu-
tional sense and what restraint that places on us when we make efforts to look up. What we
see is the criminal unforeseeingness. We cannot understand. How could you do this? When
he speaks that way, he is speaking for us. Beelzebub is speaking for us.
But when Looisos speaks out, it sounds perfectly logical. We see almost immediately that
oh boy, we are going to get into trouble from the implantation of this organ but from the
High Commission (remember it is not just Looisos) that this seems to be a perfectly logical,
necessary step that has to be taken. This is the same. The way he looks at Askokin puts it at
much, much higher level of importance than Abrustdonis and Helkdonis. But then, as he
says, Beelzebub didn’t understand this at first but later he came to understand it is quite the
opposite that when they are extracted they become contributions to the building of Higher
Being-bodies.
Participant: I have the impression that Abrustdonis, Helkdonis and Askokin are bound
together, a triad of something, a three in one and they have to separate. How would we
understand what the container is that contains the three prior to separation.
Keith: Take an ordinary life event. You wake up in the morning and you have to go to the
bathroom and then you get some coffee and you start chatting with somebody and then
other people begin to arrive and then you have breakfast. Now in all of that I haven’t made

3 Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales, p 1106

69
mention of anything notable other than a certain sequence of events when I got up. All of
this is the flow of events; this is Askokin, this is experiencing. I did have the cup of coffee; I
did sit down; I did walk from there; I went to the bathroom, etc., etc.. That is experiencing.
Now when you came over and sat down with me while I was drinking my coffee and you
said, “I have a question.” Ah! The possibility in this interchange amongst the other events
that have been taking place, the possibility in which there is some way we can be of help to
each other appears — as a possibility. If I see that there is way of helping you understand
something by telling you a story or giving you a picture or an explanation of one of the laws
the Law of Three or whatever. Whatever I do, whatever my effort is, if my effort is toward
helping you, now I am in the world Abrustdonis. I can possibly be a help into that world.
Now the event will continue. We finish our cup of coffee and we have breakfast and
then the day goes on from there. So the stream is going to continue to flow and all kinds
of events may come into them. You can’t tell when the fish will come, whether it’s going
to be a truck or a little squiggly thing–whatever–you can’t tell. That’s up to your fishing
of the event, the significance of the event. Does it contain something that has emotional
significance in the world of self-other? Does it have something to do with recognizing a
need? Is there something that can be done to be helpful? Or, is it a question of what it has
to do with understanding the Law of Three or the Enneagram or whatever? It may be more
in the arena of understanding. So, whatever degree we try to be helpful, in helping some-
one understand a particular transition from point 8 to point 5 on the enneagram, then, to the
degree that we have made that effort to be helpful to another in understanding, we have a
relationship to higher Reason or making an effort in that direction, from our understanding
to help someone else along that pathway. That is Helkdonis.
There are an unlimited amount of possibilities in any given day. Many of them have ‘no
fish’ in them. Many are just drinking a cup of coffee or going to the bathroom or carrying on
a mindless conversation about the fact that my shoe doesn’t fit well and it’s hurting the outer
part of my great toe.
Participant: In those examples, there is no connection to Abrustdonis and Helkdonis
unless there is awareness of that possibility that appears in some moment that we refer to
“waking up.” So would that be corresponding to the sequence of extraction?
Keith: Yes, exactly.
Participant: You talked about the three-finger exercise and I’ve worked with that. It is kind
of like a metaphor in terms of we’ve got Askokin, Abrustdonis and Helkdonis –these three
parts which are together and they have to be separated. My experience of that is working
with the three-finger exercise – where you have sensing, feeling and rhythmical counting–
usually those three things (sensing, feeling and thought) are mixed together. Working on the
exercise, I had the experience of them becoming separate and separated and then there was
another part of me which was much more aware and it was kind of like there was some free
attention when these three parts were then separated. And then it was like each part carried
on the work it had to do. There was some taste of freedom. But that was an experience of
three things that are normally together becoming separated.
But there was one other thing I want to thank you for. I’ve worked on this exercise a
fair bit and one thing you said that was really clarifying for me was when I read the part you
were quoting from the Third Series where Gurdjieff say about the purpose of this exercise is
to observe in ourselves the three process of feeling, sensing and thought (with the counting).

70
It was a realization was that my job in this exercise was not to try and produce this feeling
or produce sensation or particularly to produce thought but to observe these things in
myself. It made me realize that what I had been calling feeling – in your paper you wrote a
lot about the mammalian, second brain which is happening all the time and it wasn’t about
a higher emotion or feeling and that this mammalian feeling brain is working all the time
and that exercise it was a question of just me observing my motor center sensing, which is
happening all the time–observing the feeling, which is happening all the time (as it is a part
of the physical nature) and the rhythmical counting is like a formatory kind of process and
then realizing that all these things are part of my physical nature and just try to observe them
objectively and just sit there and work with the exercise, it allowed part of me to be free and
be in this other world, the Higher Emotional center where higher feelings come into it.
Basically, realizing these feelings which are massed-based, part of my mammalian,
second-brain but then these higher feelings are totally separate then these, such as love
or faith or hope. There is a difference between this mass-based world and this higher
world which is our emotional world and that they are completely separate experiences.
Before I had always kind of mixed what was happening in the second brain with higher
qualities. To just be able to observe the second brain is what the exercise helped me to
do. It was really great opportunity to work with it.
Keith: Right. I hope everybody has that differentiation clearly, which is an important one.
We have to get very familiar with our mechanical second brain, with our steady state of
mechanical emotion. It is very, very different from Higher Emotion. It is worlds away. It is
unfortunate, in the line of life, the words that we use to try to point to these states, at least
in English, can be so misleading. They can get us confused and mixed up so the differen-
tiation that you point to is a very, very essential one, one that we should always be alert to.
Where am I here [pointing to the solar plexus]?
Mrs. Popoff used to so frequently, as a departing gift, she would say, “May your sun rise.”
What she was talking about is that for us, now, we put our sun here [solar plexus]; this is the
solar plexus in the belly. May it rise. May it rise over the diaphragm so that your sun is here
[center of breast] in the Higher Emotion. She was referring always to this effort that we can
make. So this is a great reminder.
Participant: I’d like to bring up something that came earlier about our having this organ
inside of us that is not like Kundabuffer but can be real I in ourselves. Diana and I were
speaking this morning about marching bands and in just speaking about that, what came to
me in listening to this discussion, was that all of our little ‘Is’ are there to become a singular
I, to become that organ.
Now, what helped me with that is my own feeling as a separate I, an individual, a po-
tential member of the marching band – all of those little ‘Is’ within me, everyone doesn’t
want to be left out. I always wanted to be in the choir; I always wanted to be a part of you, a
part of everything existing, and not left out. So all these little ‘Is’ could they be that which is
already in us if we do make conscious use of our attention and not discard them as little ‘Is’–
not leave Bonnie out of the choir because she wants so much to be a part of it but to direct
Bonnie and the others in a way that we do amass and create this organ, this i within us that
can unify, that can properly with the help of endlessness enter World 48, enter Creation
in a way that endlessness can no longer do that, only three-brained beings who have the
capacity to have Higher Emotion, Higher Intellect and Reason to administer and govern that

71
which has been created and to do it with Conscience and proper compassion and love
for everything existing.
So all of our little ‘Is’ may be are the substrate of what that organ can become, that
we get to become part of the marching band or that stack of blocks or the unity the
I can become.
Keith: This is Bonnie’s hopefulness; she is always like this. Yes. A few of my ‘Is’ are quite
able to become Hasnamussian. They are not going to change. They are not going to join
the marching band. [laughter]
Participant: Only a few, though.
Keith: You didn’t say only a few; you said you were going to get the whole of the
marching band. [laughter] But I don’t disagree! But I think it is important to qualify,
that we are forever going to have to be on our guard.
Participant: Or they will start their own marching band. [laughter]
Participant: Well the reason that the marching band took this form, is that in speaking
with Diana about raising funds for the Golden Rule Project and quite a while ago I be-
came aware that through all the armed services that the Department of Defense gives lots
of money to marching bands. I thought well maybe we can get some Golden Rule songs and
marching band to be funded.
Participant: When I processed overnight our conversations from yesterday, there were
a couple questions that came up, one of which the question of the role of Hassein and
the future substitute. One theme was that through the whole of The Tales, that occur in
Beelzebub’s experience of exile, eventual pardon and eventual return to the center, it is
Beelzebub and Ahoon who are together. In the whole of the recounting of his wisdom and
experience with his grandson, that is another time/event that is preceding that now there is a
third part and that third part is Hassein. So that raised a question regarding what Beelzebub
represents as something that was exiled and returned. It seemed to me that Hassein is
obligated by law to return to be Beelzebub’s substitute and to process and return because
that brings back something that Beelzebub was unable to bring back because that part was
not a participant in the whole of that experience.
And then there is another question (which is my on-going fanatic question) is when we
say, relative to the independent individuality that in part Beelzebub says that he represents
in his accepting of his opportunity offered to him, that he would take this on so he could
become a particle, albeit, an independent one. When that was processed yesterday, you
taking that and putting it into the DNA and speaking of the independent uniqueness of
every individual.
So the question that comes up for me in that, from one perspective, I could look at
any unique entity, such as a leaf, I can look at any part that is an independent part of a
network whole and I could say that part is independent and that leaf is unique and I can
ascribe that to the world of materiality and DNA, yet Beelzebub, as you said in the imagery,
is not a physical entity. So whatever it is that Beelzebub represents in the context of that
representation is also implanted this question of what is independent individuality in that
realm? Is that clear?

72
Keith: No. Try again.
Participant: If Beelzebub is not a material entity, then for Beelzebub to assert part of his
aim in his story is to become an independent part then how does that correspond to ascrib-
ing independent individuality to material reality and DNA as you described that yesterday?
Keith: As far as the DNA is concerned, the independence is a very relative thing. We
are talking about the physical form of human beings on the planet Earth and that there
is something in each one of those beings that is unique, in spite of all the similarities that
they all have tongues and toes and so forth. But with all of that they share, that they hold
in common, each of them is, still and all, unique in some way. Not the whole of them–the
whole of them is not unique. That is very clear. We would never have children if that were
the case. So, no, the uniqueness are a very specific marker of the physical world. The DNA
has to do with qualifying our physical attributes, the physical body.
So it almost like there has to be some level of representation of uniqueness in that
physical world just as you point out, if you take a leaf off the oak tree, there may be billions
and billions of leaves but if you were to extract the DNA you would find that it is all the
same and it is quite unique to that tree. I don’t know if that’s why or not…do all oak trees
have the same DNA? I don’t know the answer to that. Do you know?
Participant: It would be different according to species and then there would be certain
tissues within it that are uncommitted to any kind of particular form.
Keith: But given a specific species?
Participant: It would be the same.
Keith: So, in those terms, the uniqueness would be, like in the human being, we could
say that we are special or unique in that sense, but that uniqueness is very singularly highly
focused and really doesn’t influence 99.9999% of what we do or can do. It simply marks us
as being unique in that sense.
If you follow the mitochondrial DNA in the cytoplasm back far enough, theoretically,
and several people have done this, you find a common female. There was a single female
who is the common ancestor of all of us. Following the mitochondrial DNA in the cytoplasm
you can do that kind of thing; you cannot do that following the DNA in the cell nucleus.
Participant: So I am still not getting how that would apply to Beelzebub and what he
represents as having because that is what he seems to represent in the various ways we
have spoken of what he represents.
Keith: Can we ask ourselves that question? Is there the possibility in Higher Being-body
in the individuality that emerges wherein they could say, “I am an independent particle of
everything that exists.”
Participant: Relative to the notion of independent, in DNA, in humans, there is a math-
ematical infinite combinations, but the independent part that I see is Conscience because
it is the part that allows in the moment for our species members to stand up and say, apart
from the social pressures, the familial pressures, biological pressures, the impulse to survive,
to say this is not right, and in some times in the extremist things, it calls people together.
As we say in World War II when people stood up against the rounding up of Jews or the

73
enslavement of individuals. This isn’t right and they died for it. There is something in the
freedom of Conscience to stand on the points against everything that we are subject.
I wonder if that is not part of this individuality and freedom almost from the physicality
of being.
Keith: My personal opinion is that this is a manifestation that I think we are going to have
to mature enough to see. What you just described is not Conscience. That’s a concept that is
all mixed up with good and evil, that this is evil behavior and I am against it and so on. That
is not what Conscience is.
Conscience is that which swallows the whole of what is there — the whole of what is
there. It accepts, impartially, everything. If that is part of the nidus of Conscience, it cannot
possibly be this judgment that we come down on and I object to in terms of some awful,
terrible behavior that individuals or groups participate in. No, I think we miss the mark.
We fall into the concept of modern man. Modern man looks on Conscience just as you
described. It is a good and evil thing and Gurdjieff spends a lot of time trying to dissuade
us of good and evil – that it is not like that.
Participant: Once we have had that experience of seeing all at once, it’s really hard to
then pick something to be, pick something to do that remains free after the choice to do it
and be it. There is a conditioning that happens. And it’s kind of nice to sit back in the world
of Conscience and see all at once and not have to be any one individual thing but once I’ve
seen and I pick, then I have to suffer the consequences of that choice which is what she
was talking about.
Keith: Yes, the clash. This is Makary when he points to the good and evil ends of the stick,
and then he points to what is in between. And that’s the most essential part of that that every-
body forgets. That is history, they remember the good and the evil and they forget what he is
really pointing to. The Reconciling force is the clash. That is where Conscience lies —there
in the clash.
I feel this is an extraordinarily difficult arena to really try and stand in, in terms of my
individuality. When I look at some of what is going on in the world today, I am overwhelmed.
It buries me in its painfulness and the destructiveness. And what do I do with that? First of
all I have to accept that it is real; that it is really happening so all of my agonizing over that or
all of my feeling bad about all the things that are happening in Syria or in South America–all
of that simply is. And part of the Conscience end of it is to bear that, impartially. I find that
struggle is extraordinarily difficult. I fall out of it every day. Over and over I find that part
of myself that goes into judgment that goes into feeling so offended that I want to get rid of
the whole thing; that I want to object mightily and on and on and on. I keep falling into that,
over and over.
And then, I remind myself or hopefully wake up enough so that I see that judgment
doesn’t take us anywhere. We don’t understand any more. We don’t feel and well wish for
other. What does that mean? Well-wishing for other is everybody out there–not just one
side of the Syrian war, it is all sides. What does that mean? How do I do that? How do I feel
inside? What part of me–is it down here–when I have this self-emotion–this that comes out
of my physical nature? Or it is up here where I get very confused because I have feelings
that I want to be able to appreciate and really make the underpinning for the world of man-
ifestation but I find I don’t understand that manifestation. What am I to do? How am I to do
it? For myself, that is just extraordinarily difficult.

74
 So the question of Conscience is a very big one and I think it goes way beyond good
and evil.
Participant: The hope there are some moments when we can see that, and that stops it
even momentarily and then something else has a possibility of emerging within ourselves–
another particle can be created within ourselves. That is the hopeful thing in the midst of
all this confusion. The minute I can step aside and separate myself, I see something dif-
ferent. And then I will fall into it again but I am not completely captured by it. Something’s
changed. That is that moment of grace I’ve transubstantiated something by stepping aside.
And there is a moment of grace, really it is impartiality, a brief moment when you embrace,
as you said, the whole picture and you are not caught.
I was looking for the discussion of impartiality in The Tales, which was in “Purgatory.”
That has always seemed so important an idea of what really is impartiality if I could really
understand these Laws of Three and Seven that could mean that I would see everything; it
would all be apparent and there wouldn’t be a need for any kind of judgment at all about
anything. I would see that lawfulness of all of it. Then I wouldn’t be caught and I could
transubstantiate Helkdonis and Abrustdonis. [laughs]
Keith: It is that getting to that impartiality and the understanding of Law.
Participant: I have that struggle myself, whether it is global warming or the world’s pro-
blems and trying to bring Reason into it. Trying to be impartial is having different degrees
of Reason but it certainly hurts–not to run away from it but to be aware of what’s happening.
That degree of impartiality is pretty far away; of being able to see what it is. There must
be hope; there must be the possibility that there is someone or there is a group that could
somehow be sincere and help to look at that. But as an individual, to hear that news, it is
constant. Years ago, when we heard of a mass slaughter, we spoke about falling into this
false suffering–that’s been helpful. My experience now is to try to bring a deeper Reason.
Participant: What has been a help for me in this is the question of looking at this as
a representation of the way things are at different levels and there is nothing to do with
agreeing or not agreeing. At one level, my solution of all these terrible things is to kill all
the people who are doing the terrible things, which makes me one of them. As Keith
says, this is just so awful and sad so for me to recognize that this is the way it is, not with
everybody but with certain people at certain levels. Those sleeping people who get enough
political power and make life miserable for all sorts of other people — that is how it is.
Regarding the groups that counteract these people; Gurdjieff talks about that in
Beelzebub’s Tales. They are good for a while and then they either fall apart because they
fight with each other or it turns into its opposite. As long as there is this level of sleeping
man engaged in protecting negativity, that is what it is going to be like there.
So then we have to recognize that that is how it is; there is nothing as an individual I
can do about that. There is something I can do about that in me. And perhaps ease some
of the burden for those who are in contact with me so I don’t fall into World 96 in myself.
Maybe that is my Work. This is painful for me to have see objectively like that, what must
it be like for endlessness to see into hearts and minds of all three-brained creatures?
So maybe if I take my small part of that on myself maybe that has something to do with
lightening the burden of endlessness.

75
Participant: I don’t even see it among people. People have taken whatever it is as it is. I
see intelligence in the Universe from plants and one-brained beings and two-brained beings
with their own intelligence and what we inflict on them. It is not part of their nature to inflict
on each other.
Participant: I don’t mean to imply that people shouldn’t get together and try and ame-
liorate that as best they can but that if it could be approached with an attempt to bring a
reconciling understanding, it might produce different results that if it is just to go to war
with what I don’t agree with. But we here, we have got to do something; we might as well do
something that feels appropriate to us. But I think reason tells, even when I am engaged
in those attempts, I am doing what I can but I don’t have great expectations it is going to
change the world but maybe a little corner of it could be better for a while and, collectively,
over many centuries, I think we have seen a change, certainly in the West, humanism and the
rise of individuals and responsibility to the environment so it is not that nothing is happen-
ing. I might be a tiny little individual in that larger counter-movement to the lower level of
sleep but even much of that is sleep also; it just has different motives.
It is heartbreaking. I think of the words attributed to Buddha on his awakening, “Behold
the world is Nirvana; it is also monstrous suffering.” We have to hold both of those. It will
break the heart but it breaks the heart open. It releases compassion, “Forgive them, Father,
they know not what they do.” But they are still doing it.
Participant: I sense that there is something that we can do. Part of the myth is to reconcile
ourselves to that horrendousness. And yet, in my small world, for example, I could take
Hurricane Katrina and, in the life of the Earth, we could see that as a horrendous experi-
ence but it really isn’t anything horrendous about it; it really is quite normal, like a volcano,
like St. Helens, is a normal event in the life of the Earth. We make it something horrible –
not to discount the fact that there is immense suffering, undeniable but that is part of what
we enter into. There is nothing bad or good about that; it is just what it is.
But those emotions that get unleashed, it would seem that my reaction to that could be,
at a certain level maybe the emotions are the same, and to the degree that I can change my
response to that event, it almost seems like I have the potential to change everything in that
world–not tomorrow but it significant in terms of what we can do. It may never be in my
experience to experience the horror of war but, at a level of emotional energy; I can be in a
point within myself where that same emotional energy could be transformed.
Keith: Does this bear on the issue of personal and group; is there something that Gurdjieff
groups, as a point, but other groups as well? Is there something in common here? Is there
something that can only be done by groups? Is there something that can only be done by
individuals? Are they similar? Are they the same things? What is it that we, as individuals,
bring in our own daily life as an individual, as an I? And what do we bring as a member of a
group? What does that group bring relative to these gargantuan issues, these great prob-
lems? Do you see a distinct difference there–difference between the individual and the
group? How do you see that in your own world, because we come from lots of different
worlds? Some of us are quite solitary, quite separated from any other Gurdjieff group work;
some of us are very intimately involved on a daily, weekly basis with Gurdjieff group work.
Some of us live in or are closely associated with communities of work people and some
of us are totally separate and on our own. How does this apply to all of that relative to

76
our responsibility? What is it that we are engaged in that we share with others as individuals,
as groups?
Participant: I have two examples that are dangerously close to real life. It has only been
individuals that have made significant impacts on humanity; for example, the founders of
the religions. In other arenas it would be people with vision in technology. These people
have been galvanizing forces. We could point to other things that are happening today that
have been galvanizing forces for at attempt at conscientious examination.
But on the other hand there are things that groups have done, such as building the
cathedrals where it was not possible for one person to build a cathedral. So it seems like
there are things that surely there were galvanizing forces that could get enough people to
work for a long enough time to create some monument like that in some school like that,
but perhaps there are different applications that are more suitable to groups and more
suitable to individuals.
Keith: Bennett put great emphasis on the communities.

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October Gathering 2016 ~ Saturday Afternoon

Reading: J. G. Bennett, Deeper Man, p 225

The possibility is given to us of forming a vessel which will cross the
alam-I arva h and reach the spiritual world. Then it can be discarded.
This vessel is the body Kesdjan. Gurdjieff describes, the state of the sub-
stance of the inner world in ordinary man is like a cloud. It is amorphous,
without any coherence of its own. It temporarily takes up the ‘shape’ of
whatever physical part is attracting our interest. At one time it is a mouth,
at another an eye, at another an anus and so on. If life is lived like that,
then only the very barest kind of organization is produced, because with-
out the body it is always in a state of dream. Many of the exercises that we
do are aimed at producing some coherence in this substance. We learn
how to use our attention to separate and blend the various energies of
which it is made. This is what is meant by alchemy. Besides this active
work, it is also necessary to practice meditation or something of the kind
in which we do not try to do anything. If we can become quiet enough,
the energies settle into their appropriate places in us and can coalesce to
form the second body. We can call whatever state this substance is in the
‘soul’, but we have to remember that this is a relative term: some souls
are much more substantial than others.
Keith: There is a very interesting intimation in our practice of sensing. It is interesting
to explore if we go with it far enough, far enough relative to what is its purpose. We can
understand that it is trying to bring us into contact with our physical body, so that we are
physically really present in whatever the life-flow of events are. And we do this by sensing.
I want you to bring up whatever picture of the nervous system that you have in mind.
We are so built that there are afferent and efferent nerves. Afferent means coming back in
from the periphery to the brain through the spinal cord. Efferent means going out the brain
or the spinal cord to the periphery.
Afferent Efferent
(in-coming) (out-going)
Associative
Sensory Cortex Motor
Sensory Cortex Cortex Motor
instruments instruments

(fiber tracks (fiber tracks

and end-organs) and end-organs)

When you sense and you reach out with attention, you reach out into your leg or your
arm. The question is what is the root? How does that neural process go on?

78
Participant: I am thinking arm but I am connecting with my image of my arm.
Keith: So I can intentionally do that; if I do it with intention. If I have an aim to sense
my arm, it is logical in what we know about neurophysiology to conclude that what is really
going on is in the brain itself, that we are making a neural connection inside the brain. We
know that inside the brain that if we continue to make certain kinds of efforts. This could
be learning how to play ping-pong, it could be learning to swim, learning a language or to
studying physics or playing the piano.
There are multiple pathways in the brain that are explored, specific pathways that are
explored when we are leaning a particular skill. If we are studying language, it is the lan-
guage part of the brain that becomes very involved. There are many, many interconnections
that are explored. If you try at our adult age to learn a new form of language, we know how
difficult it is, trial and trial to get the pronunciation right, to use words in sentences, to
communicate with it. It takes a long time with a lot of practice.
It is the repetition that I want to go after, because literally what we have been able to
demonstrate in recent neurophysiologic research on the brain is that we literally build new
pathways. Pathways that have never existed before in the brain are made when we make
efforts of a certain kind–efforts in a direction that do not come naturally. You don’t know
how to play ping-pong because you are born, you have to practice it; or to play an instrument
or to do many things. So there is this repetition and this exploration that has to go on and
on and on. However, the end result of that exploration and repetition is that we build new
pathways. And those pathways over hundreds of thousands or millions of years get passed
on. In other words, our capacity for language was not there five hundred thousand years ago.
Our capacity for nuclear physics was not there ten thousand years ago. You can say that the
brain was there yes, yes. Were the neural pathways that make all that exploration possible?
Not necessarily. They had to be built. How do you build them? By experimenting, by trying,
so we try to communicate.
Go back to early man fifty to seventy thousand years ago when he was trying to talk and
share information to another human being. Just think of how experimental that was. If you
put yourself in that position of saying something about food to this other being, or we have
to pick up something to move it out of the way and he has to help me do that because it is
too heavy for me. How do I communicate that?
So there are many, many ways to understand how human beings, in the course of thou-
sands and thousands of years, how we have built new pathways in our brain. It was not all
there at the beginning. Because the brain is adaptable and because we, on a cellular basis,
are adaptable, we can build new pathways.
So let’s now come to something. We build new pathways and for us to sense in ordinary
life is a new activity. Who goes around in ordinary life sensing? Why would I do such a crazy
thing as that? Why do I try to sense my foot? That doesn’t serve any purpose. There is no
reason for doing that. But we do. We explore as all people who make effort in this direction
and build new neural pathways. Over time in the distant future, perhaps, those neural path-
ways having been laid down will become more readily available. Just like languages for us
now, the use of our hands as far as now compared to how it was fifty thousand years ago.
So over time with our efforts to sense neurologically we are going to build pathways
in our brain that generationally goes on into the future and it is going to make it easier and
more possible to build those new neural pathways–until maybe it begins to happen from
birth. Imagine what our life would be if you had been sensing your body all of your life.

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 If you were aware of your body all the time, asleep, awake – every moment you’re
sensing – not because you make a conscious effort but because it simply is the way that
you were put together, what a marvelous, marvelous development that would be. That
would mean in the future we would not have to do any special work because, it would
already be there. Why would that be so terribly unusual if in the future I could sense
my leg? What does it do for me now? In my physical body does it do anything? In the
physical world every day, does it do anything? Well maybe, maybe. If I put it down in
terms of movements, in terms of other kinds of conscious effort maybe it does play a sig-
nificant role. But maybe in the distant future it becomes something that we are born with.
When you sense, Gurdjieff tells us that we are building atmosphere around our moon.
Now if Moon, in the analogy that we began with yesterday in Earth–Moon–Anulios,
if Moon is our planetary body, it is our physical body; if we are building an atmosphere
around the physical body through sensing, in helping to build its atmosphere, am I not
assisting evolution? Am I not assisting the evolution of the physical body?
We spoke earlier about how it is essential to see involution and evolution perhaps in a
very different way by including the requirement for us to participate in the evolution of the
lower worlds. Not just our own world of our thoughts and feelings and so forth but if it has
also to do with the world of our physical body that we have an obligation, a responsibility to
assist that physical body in its evolution to a higher state of consciousness? Certainly if the
body had built into it something that led it to sense itself from the beginning of its life of
manifestation, we could truthfully say it is more conscious. The body is more conscious,
more conscious of itself. So in Gurdjieff’s terms more consciousness has entered the world.
The moon has developed an atmosphere. And who knows what that future is?
If the moon in Gurdjieff’s terms, if moons become earths [planets] and earths [planets]
become suns, those are difficult images for us to deal with in today’s terms of astronomy as
we understand where moons come from and where earths [planets] come from and then we
turn that all around, all upside down and then say look the Earth is growing to become a sun.
If we take it in the terms that, as perhaps Gurdjieff was intending us to take it–in human
terms, then it is a different question. Then it is a different question to ask what the future
of sensing is. We meet that responsibility of assisting our physical body to become more
conscious, what does that do to our consciousness right now, just now in these moments do
we become more conscious? Obviously we do. If consciousness is something that belongs to
the totality of our physical body it, if we really come to realize that I am in my physical body
and that a third of my being is in the physical body, then anything that assists that physical
body becoming more conscious is a big deal–an important thing to do and an important
effort to make, to bring into greater consciousness.
When we struggle with these concepts of Abrustdonis and Helkdonis, which are all
efforts to move up the Ray [of Creation] to get into the upper octave of Air and into the
octave of Impressions, we have also to remember in that effort to move up we also have
responsibilities moving down and those are very personal responsibilities.
Responsibility to sense is what our aim should be, because it is possible. It is not imagi-
nary at all. Certainly it is not imaginary in my experience. It is possible to have a continuing
sense of the body for long, long periods of time, hours at a time. When you’re always sensing
the body is not an impossibility and for me it is that, not twenty four hours a day, every min-
ute, not yet, but it may be in the future that it becomes conscious. So, if I become conscious
of this portion of my being then I am really talking about something that is a big deal relative
to my own future.

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 I’m talking about Abrustdonis and Helkdonis, of making the effort to coalesce Kesdjan
and Higher Being-body and I am doing something now with the physical body. I am working
on my being and if I don’t make that effort I am not working as I could have worked in the
whole of my being.
So participating in that marvelous exercise of Mr. Adie’s this morning, when we speak
then of the body, we speak of sensation and then “I Am.” Really we are incorporating the
physical body, the physical aspect of being, of “I Am” into this whole effort. That becomes
something really special and something that is more and more possible that we can do that,
and to assist the physical body to become more conscious.
Are there questions or impressions that you would like to share relative to illustration and
questions that have to do with the digestive octaves of Air or Impressions? One of the most
intriguing and interesting efforts in the world is to bring spirit and the electro-diagnostic
together. Matthieu Ricard,1 he is a marvelous spokesman. Google him and you will bump
into a very interesting and remarkable guy.

Simultaneities of the Triads of Law, Food, Air, Impressions Octave

H12 category H 6 category
photonic powers of Will
Attention GRACE Higher Emotion
Intentional absorption o nd conscious shock Higher Intellect
of higher being-foods sec
simultaneity simultaneity
MI FA
132 231
12 6

SOL LA
213 312
12 FOOD

hi
6

gh
H24 category DO
768

er
simultaneity SI RE
321 123 H6
EM 12 384 simultaneity
phenomena
RE SOL
sensory 123 FA SI 213
images of 24 231 321 6
24 LA MI 6
psychic both inner 312 132
and outer 24 192
and
shock

worlds
degree

spiritual
life of non-mass-
man based-ionic
ious

waveforms DO
s of

sensory A IR
nsc

SOL FA 192
input DO 213 231
Re
co

48 48 96
as

H48 category
IMP R E SSI O NS
on

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132 123
“serves active 48 96 “FA96 – SOL48
physical and serves physical/passive
brained structural aspects”
functioning” SI LA
321 312 “biochemical
6 6
source of feeling
energies”

Participant: Just a simple question, could you please define the meaning of atmosphere?
The atmosphere in the body what does that mean? Maybe my image is not that good.
Keith: No–your image is fine. It is just that it is like the Earth’s. The Earth has an atmos-
phere; where does that atmosphere come from? It comes from many places, right? But one

1 https://www.ted.com/talks/matthieu_ricard_on_the_habits_of_happiness

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of the major things that keep contributing to it is the activity of the world of plants. For us it
contributes oxygen and oxygen is something that we are absolutely dependent upon for our
life. We begin to realize that we are contributing to increasing consciousness in the atmos-
phere. Actually many people share impressions that there is something vibrating outside of
my physical body. I can sense it. That’s very, very difficult to talk about, how are we going
to talk about the atmosphere around your leg or your arm, we’re sounding crazy. It is very
difficult–what’s there? You know there is nothing observable. The atmosphere is something
that we are subjectively and objectively, in terms of our attention aware of. We are aware of
the activity; the livingness of the tissue is producing life on the planet produces and con-
tributes to its atmosphere. Does that help?
Participant: When you say atmosphere it is also inside? Is that right–there is a vibration
inside?
Keith: It’s continuous. We find air wherever we go. We can dig a hole and it is still there.
There is no place where there is not air or things that contribute to that. When we think of
the physical body there are many things that contribute to the atmosphere of the physical
body. For now, those have to do with elements that are in the world of electromagnetic
impulses and forces and those we can’t paint, we cannot put a color on them, we cannot
say anything about an experiment that you can prove it. Down the road it wouldn’t surprise
me at all that we would develop this sensitivity. You see what we are able to do. Remember
you saw Matthieu Ricard’s picture on the magazine as the happiest man in the world? Do
you know who he is? Matthieu Ricard is a Frenchman, his parents were in one of Bennett’s
groups early on and this is going way, way back. Matthieu became a biologist, a PhD in
chemical biology and molecular biology and at the age of 25 he decided he wanted to be-
come a priest. So he went to India and became a Buddhist. He is a very intimate friend of
the Dalai Lama and he is the leader in America of an effort that has been going on now for
almost twenty years at the University of Wisconsin in doing MRI and other electro-diagnostic
evaluations of brain function among meditators. It is he, for now over thirty years brought
Buddhist monks to the United States and had them all wired up and do serial MRIs of what
is happening inside their brains and where is that happening.
We had an interesting conversation with him and he wouldn’t remember us from a
hole in the wall because he was trying to talk with 150 people during one of the breaks at
the seminars that the Dalai Lama puts on and we were fortunate enough to get down to
Washington for that. It was one of the early seminars that the Dalai Lama was a sponsor of.
When the Dalai Lama left for a couple of hours to meet with the president surreptitiously,
Matthieu simply came down off the podium and mixed with all the people. He was carrying
on conversations with everybody and we had our opportunity to have a little conversation
with him, he is very outgoing, gregarious very warm but also he has over 40,000 documented
hours of meditation. He meditates on the average 4-5 hours a day, still does and that is part
of his life routine.
Now I suspect that he has an atmosphere around his body. I strongly expect that he has
been assisting his physical body into a real presence into the world. In any case I mention
that because it is an effort that is going on in the world of neurophysiology using modern
instruments that have become immensely subtle. It is very surprising the kinds of things that
they have been able to dig out.
For instance with Matthieu, they have recorded that part of his brain that lights up and
it lights up more than any other brain that they have ever seen examined and the title on

82
the front page of Time magazine that he is the happiest man in the world because this area
in the parietal lobe is exactly where all the other meditator’s, and ordinary people like you
and I, we light up the same areas, whereas ours are less intense. Still and all this is modern
neurophysiology. They are climbing inside of machines documenting that these kinds of
changes are taking place. So down the road, in the next 20-30-40 years we have no idea what
is going to be unearthed so far as neural capacities, as far as identifying further and further
events that take place inside of the brain.
Participant: Do any of these machines work on the level of emanation? Do they read
something outside the body or is it all inside?
Keith: So far the only thing that I know that is trying to go another direction is to use pulse
magnetic waves as an exploration in the treatment of depression. In other words, they bring a
magnet with strong magnetic pulses up close; in this case it is over here on the lateral-frontal
area. Over a period of time they have pulsed this at high levels of magnetic pulses and they
knew where to go for this because previous experiments have shown that there are docu-
mented electroencephalographic changes in the brain when you hit it with magnetic impuls-
es. The one study that I read about was surprisingly successful for a while. The depressive
symptoms that the patient was complaining of, there were 30-40 patients in the study, were
markedly reduced for a period of a month or two, something like that. It wasn’t established
as a treatment program for them because the research program simply used the pulse, saw
what happened and published it. And, as has happened in so many things in medicine, every-
body walked away from it. No one that I know of has gone anywhere with it. That there is an
influence from outside inside, we know that. It is just that it is still simply asking the ques-
tion is there an influence. Yes, there is an influence. There have been some fragmentary and
frightening studies, negative studies done on high power lines close to children’s schools, play
areas and most of us have some familiarity about that. They have a very negative implication
about the dangers, the injuries that can come from that kind of thing.
So relative to the digestive octaves of Air and Impressions, are there any questions?
Is this very straightforward so far as the illustrations are concerned now?
Participant: I would like to ask a question about what you said earlier. We use this phrase,
“to grow new connections”. I am wondering whether we have a physiological basis yet to
understand this. New dendrites grow? Does it mean that neurons … that there is a seeking
out? What is it that is seeking out? For instance, I want to figure out how to sense my
leg, but I don’t know what you are talking about. So I sit here and try to sense my leg and
try again but there are not yet new connections. What’s going on? I am wondering if we
understand what is moving along the neurons and seeking a magnetic field, feeling its way
into all the neurons and moving stuff around.”
Keith: Paul MacLean tells the story, not about himself, about investigators in neurophy-
siology because he was asked questions like you’re asking and they kept after him because
he would give this very complex kind of answer about some experiment that he had done.
More and more frustration showed up in the group and finally one of them said “no, no more
of this sophisticated scientific stuff. What does a brain do?”
And he thought about that for a while and he says “brains hunt.”
Then the question was “What do they hunt for?” Significance, significance.
What they’ve found in answer to your question, which is a good question but has a mar-
velously precise answer–it hunts. It sends out dendrites. It sends out little projections from

83
the nerve cell body–it just sends them out, in all directions, until something significant
happens. It is still hunting, hunting for what–significance.
What does it mean? Does it mean anything? Well if we are trying to gain a new skill,
whether studying a language, hand-eye coordination or whatever it is and something happens
in that arena in that part of the brain that has significance because it relates some aspect of
those functions, then the brain pursues that. Then it builds more dendrites and a more sure
connection. Then if those dendrites make sure of those connections then it begins to insulate
them. Insulation, a fatty material begins to incorporate along that dendritic fiber. Why, to
insulate it? To make sure that stays open and is going to be more usable from moment to
moment. This happens in our brain all the time especially when we explore, when we have
new ideas, when we explore with new sensations, with new activities, like when working on
Movements. Movements are a marvelous way to stimulate the brain, the neuromuscular
parts of the brain, to stimulate new pathways. We are all the time trying to figure out how
to do it. And we never get it exactly right. We are always trying to bring together multiple
coordinated motions that have a certain meaning and that meaning is in another part of the
brain so we have to build new dendritic processes extending into those parts of the brain.
Participant: You keep saying we. And the current terminology is the brain does this, as
if the brain is some independent entity.
Keith: Well it’s your brain, it’s my brain, and we choose to be possessive, but …
Participant: We did a really fun thing with the kids at school on brain growth and we
talked about how we make new neural connections. They had four maps with pictures of the
brain. And on the first one they had two sides using a very thin thread for a connection and
when you practice a skill more they put on a thicker piece of string as the skill would grow.
And the last time a piece of straw was put on as they mastered a skill. It was fun as an adult
even to visualize this process. At first the connection was very thin because the journey had
been made only once and then the pathways became stronger and stronger. The insulated
pathways had been established.
Keith: This should be very encouraging to us, now, right here in this room, that this kind
of thing makes such sense. It is true with us. The more effort, the more pathways, the more
there is a built-in urge, and this is one thing that I think we can feel very positive about
because there is hope –hope is buried in this.
If I have this visualization of these little filaments reaching out, if I confirm this hunting
it is going on inside of me–it’s not going on because I make the effort for it to hunt. I didn’t
make my brain. My brain hunts because that’s what brains are for. Brains are for hunting and
bringing meaning and significance to whatever it encounters in thought, in feeling and in
motion.
Participant: Another thing that I have begun to notice is how we practice three notes and
we struggle and get a little better, like you are saying, but then we stop for a few seconds or
change the subject or have a break, and during that little break time something happens on
the down time that made it easier and more concise when you come back to it. If you wait
the next day, it’s gone, but if you come right back to it there’s a jump towards better, quicker.
Keith: We know exactly how that happens. Because what happens in the in-between is that
the neural fibers that have been sent out and didn’t bring back information that is useful,
those are given up. Then there are tracks that do bring a reward of information that is useful

84
and those are maintained. All the other tracks that were going on, perhaps at the same time,
those are given up if no information is given back.
Participant: I see that.
Participant: There is something that I realize as an adult when I make the negative
connections and pathways, where I’ve got negative emotion, and the more I am feeling
then the negative part gets stronger and stronger. So that’s the importance of not going into
the negative pathways, because then if we stop all the pathways being made they will close
up again. Their connections then close up. It’s made me realize that if I’m feeling negative
thoughts their getting bigger and wider and then I stop my thoughts and then the brain’s
plasticity will close them.
Keith: Yes, all the time. You starve them.
Participant: Yes, they can’t grow again.
Participant: So brains are designed to hunt. All brains are designed to hunt. All brains
hunt in search for meaning, meaning for whom, meaning for what? It seems as if something
is learning to use the machine and program it first.
Keith: Well can we see that first in terms of the physical body and then in growth patterns
in children we begin to see them socially interact and test out their problems, what they like,
what disturbs them. So they begin not just in the physical sense but also beginning really on
the emotional sense to interact and they build pathways.
Participant: And that is supported by what? That we sense that we divide our attention,
that we try and explore higher feelings? That is not about like in a sense. So it seems to me
that we come back to this mystery of me, my, I and learning to break up inside its body, to
break up inside its nervous system and its brain and learn to have this tension to redesign it.
Keith: One way to approach this is to bring it into relationship with the question of function
of life on Earth. If we see that from the sun, the do of the lateral octave, and the si being
the planetary world, in the solar world we are dealing almost exclusively with energies, form-
less, there are no masses that we give great consideration to when we are talking about solar,
or do of the Lateral Octave or we’re talking about energies, high energies; conscious and di-
rected energies, but they have to interact with the world of particles, atoms and molecules
in order to bring into realization something in that world of molecules and atoms that is a
manifestation of the pattern. The pattern derives from the solar world, the do of the Lateral
Octave. When that pattern, which I believe that original imprint is the great enneagram [Ray
of Creation], the enneagrammatic expression of life in all of its inner and outer relationships
and all of its potential is contained in the do-si of the lateral octave.
Do-si leads into the la-sol-fa, the la-sol-fa then being the connecting link in the Lateral
Octave which has to be completed to the mi. It has to be completed appropriately so the
la-sol-fa is Microcosmos, which for four billion years is the only kind of manifestation of life,
of the impulse that has come through the planetary world of atoms and molecules; we are an
expression of that, each living thing on the planet is an expression of that. But the first that
comes is the Microcosmos or one-celled life. It took four billions years and that is where the
experimenting went on. Just imagine how much experimentation can go on, how much trial
and error can go on in four billion years. That’s fantastic. We have no real notion of what that
involved.

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 Ray of
Great Ray Creation Gamma,
World 1 – Absolute Xray &
DO
Ultraviolet
MI
World 3 – All SI
Worlds
World Bio-
Lateral of Moons photons
World 6 – All Suns LA MI All Life
Octave fa

World 12 – Sun SOL do World

of Planets sol
ELF waves
FA la Brained Life
FA fa
World 24 – All FA si
Planets World
si sol
la sol fa Organic Life of Suns SOL
on Earth do la
SOL
sol
World 48 – Earth MI mi LA si
do fa
SI la
Detail of a
World 96 – Moon RE re Lateral Octave
DO LA insiSymbol form
sol
do
SI la fa
SOL
It is not repetition of the same thing because built in, built in to the Law, the enneagram-
matic expression of the intervals and the unexpectednesses at every single octave, there is
going to be experimentation and many, many failures. There are many Microcosmos that no
longer exist. We have evidence of that on the planet. But they died out. What did they die
out? Well a whole bunch of things caused this. They ran out of food or ran into cosmos that
were bigger than they were; there are all kinds of reasons.
However, finally comes this
Lateral Octave
experiment in learning how to get
along with other cells. And the first fa
evidence that we have is not that the Surplanetary The Great Turning
one cell repeated itself in terms of to Brained Life
t i o l–fa

reproduction. Before that, began the

l

Tetartocosmoses
na
o l u –so

experiment of living with other.

i n v i–la

la fa
sol
And this is where the mitochondria
–s

Microcosmos One-brained
do

comes in. The original suppositions,

now in microbiological terms, there si sol Two-brained
were little life-forms, there were do la Three-brained
essentially mitochondria that had
energy systems inside of themselves
a
so a l
l–f
i–l o n

si
that produced sufficient energy for
– s uti

Kesdjan Body
a–

do
do e v o l

that life-form to continue to operate.

Higher Being-body
It could bring in sufficient molecular
forms from the outside world. It Ascending Octave — Hope of ENDLESSNESS
could defend itself on the surface
and so it was able to persist. So, at
some point in time and it’s only four billion years old, the supposition is, the evidence gets
very, very complex and not at all easy to dig out–the supposition is that these little tiny
microbial cells, these energy systems were incorporated or eaten, if you will, by bigger cells.
The difference being that when they entered into the cell it was into the cytoplasm not the
nucleus because the nucleus had its own energy system. But the energy system that came

86
inside of it were so beneficial to the whole cell that the whole cell decided it wasn’t going to
eat and digest it because it was a ready source of fuel. It could make ATP and the ATP could
enter into the Kreb cycle and be used in the digestion of sugars and so on. Energy would
come out the other end that would help cells survive.
So very early, while it is still Microcosmos, these energy systems begin to appear inside
of cells. Eventually the cells begin to share and this goes back to what we talked about earlier
when I talked about neural influences or electromagnetic influences where you have cells
that have charge on their exterior. Cells begin to develop increasingly complex forms of
charge on their external coating. In other words, the molecules begin to line the exterior
coating of the cells and they themselves begin to develop sensitivities; sensitivities, for in-
stance, in the immediate vicinity, out there in the environment. Is it food? Is it something
that can be made use of? Well, it has markers, it has charges on its surface. Are they com-
patible with the charges on another surface? If not, it is rejected and not gone after. It
may be avoided or moved away from or it may move to incorporate it and use it as food.
Eventually that begins to happen between cells where they begin to explore each other
as to whether or not it will become beneficial to become incorporated or beneficial to live
separately. And these cells begin to blend.
Participant: Keith may I ask a question? The earliest mitochondria that you talked about
were they also female?
Keith: We don’t know.
Participant: Along that same line, have you looked into, because earliest cells with a
nucleus, those prokaryotic organisms with the blue-green, I mean with the green algae and
too, there were more of the blue-green non-nucleated species? It seems to be interesting
because they were capable of synthesizing energy just from chemicals as opposed to blue-
green algae coming along and photosynthesizing, transforming energy via photosynthesis.
So those first, and you were saying that the mitochondria of the DNA is different from the
mitochondria of the cytoplasm. So, what do you think about how those nucleated prokary-
otic organisms developed? Do we know where those mitochondria came in?
Keith: Another version of the same question, no we don’t. The answer may be out there
but it is an intriguing question where it came from originally. But much of it is singularly
around sexuality. In other words, we have non-sexual reproduction; non-sexual life-forms
for a long period of time and so sexuality only entered the issue here along the line of this
differentiation billions of years ago. Still and all it wasn’t at the very beginning as far as
we know. So part of it is all wrapped up in these historical states that are so distant that
when you try to find evidence of them in living organisms it is very difficult, extraordinarily
difficult.
Participant: So you have talked about pheromones about being a way to exchange
information between living things–what creates that pheromone? Is it the mitochondria
in the cell?
Keith: The mitochondria supply the energy for it. Think of the mitochondria as an energy
producer. It produces ATP (adenosine triphosphate bond), ADP (adenosine diphosphate
bond) or AMP (adenosine monophosphate). Why is this distinctive? Because the second
and the third bonding energy to hold to phosphate in orbit require more energy, so if you

87
can get it to stick it contains more energy in it. It gives up a higher level of energy in terms
of the bond through whatever process it becomes involved with. ATP becomes involved
in the digestion of sugar and glucose, breaking down into smaller usable substances. In
that sense the mitochondria provides energy whatever the manufacturing process is going
to be including breaking down proteinaceous substances, carbon based substances, fatty
substances and so on.
Participant: So it is still a female-based something?
Keith: Well that is where the confusion comes in and the question that Zeke had as well.
Do we know where that begins to occur? Because there is an interesting inference and if it
has always been like that, then it gives an interesting dominance to the female influence
throughout all life. So it is an important question but I don’t know that anybody has any
definitive answer.
Participant: I would like to go back to the reading and my question, and we have talked
about this before, that what I have come across is this conflict in myself and the conflict I
feel, maybe not in the structure but the emphasis of the Work. I don’t know how to put this
but we were talking about the body Kesdjan and the coalescing of certain aspects of the body
Kesdjan being an aim or a result perhaps of any one of our lives’ efforts may produce. But on
the other hand I have this profound sense of unimportance, this really strong sense of my
own nothingness, my own insignificance in these cosmic processes. Yet I also have a visceral
and personal understanding of the Work, this Work, any form of Work, as having an aim and
an agency beyond anything that I might aspire to, so I find a certain conflict that the idea of
the aim of the Work is to congeal a Kesdjan Body which is to take us to an energy world. And
this idea of nothingness, that this idea that I am not important and yet the Work is important.
When we talk about the body Kesdjan I almost feel a certain distaste because there is almost
a spiritual ambition about this wish. I really want to know with all these processes that go on
what is this Work for? What for? We spend all this time doing Work and there is a for what
but I don’t know what that is. Does that make any sense?
Keith: Not a great deal. (laughter)
Participant: Let me just say something real quick in response and that is Gurdjieff’s book
All and Everything tears apart what I grew up with and what is surrounding me of the blasé
ideas that I would be stuck with if we didn’t have Gurdjieff’s wonderful mind to interact
with. And I have got to think that without you guys I wouldn’t be able to read that book. But
anyway, for me, it gives me this sense that conscious labor and intentional suffering has a law
conformable action, it builds things. I don’t need to worry about those things. They are going
to happen because I do the other. In other words, the soul gets built, whatever you want
to call it. If you want to use a fancy word like Kesdjan, go ahead. It happens because of the
Work ideas. If I consciously labor and intentionally suffer the Law of Three must produce
x, y and z, which he defines and because he defines it, it makes me realize that there is
another way of seeing things that are objective. That’s how I use it. I don’t turn it into a goal
to build some body as Ravi reminds us that Kesdjan dies to. It perishes also. He says that the
Gurdjieffers make such a big deal out of that and why do they do that because it dies too.
Then he chuckles. There are different ways of seeing it.

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Participant: Perhaps is it the being nothing that is the beginning point from which the
Work produces? It is where we start after we have done a bunch of work with the ego, the
lower centers–maybe that experience of being nothing is an important something.
Participant: No I don’t think it is from the beginning.
Participant: No, I mean a place of beginning.
Participant: It’s a new do.
Participant: New do. Thank you.
Participant: I was just reflecting on the constancy of it as aiding in maintaining my humility.
Participant: Right–you have to come back and back to it.
Keith: What does Beelzebub say about this question that we are trying to engage ourselves
with? When he is approached by Looisos immediately before the second descent and Looisos
asks him to perform this service for endlessness, of going down to the planet and doing
what he can to reduce or eliminate this sacrifice of one- and two-brained beings that is being
carried on to such an extraordinary degree–what is Beelzebub’s answer?
Participant: Is it something about being worthy to perform this?
Participant: A particle of everything existing.
Keith: Although an independent particle of everything existing, of the whole, chew on that.
That’s not an easy concept. You put that into one side of your brain and it blows up the other
side of your brain when he says how can something be independent and yet automatic.
Participant: That’s actually out of Ashiata Shiemash [Purgatory].
Keith: Well then Ashiata, how does Beelzebub identify Ashiata? He is now sitting on the
counsel of Podkoolads. He is a sacred Podkoolad. He is on the immediate committee that
endlessness makes use of in understanding and governing and doing all the things neces-
sary to do to run the world. He puts him there you see and after Ashiata has been sent to
the Earth to perform his task and the task collapses. And yet he is sitting as an advisor to
endlessness and Beelzebub joins him. Now there is something to try and chew on.
Participant: I guess they are not giving up.
Keith: What do you mean by that?
Participant: Meaning that if it didn’t work according to plan that doesn’t mean it didn’t
succeed to some degree.
Keith: Well Ashiata is one of many other sacred beings that Beelzebub identifies as being
sent to the Earth to try to relieve some of their difficulties, some of the problems, their
problem with Kundabuffer. And none of them until the time of Ashiata have succeeded.
The use of Faith, Hope and Love and their use has been so denigrated. But with conscience
it also undergoes denigration.
Participant: The independent particles and I am chewing on that all the time as I try to
digest Beelzebub’s Tales and what Gurdjieff carries as a theme throughout is that Beelzebub

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returns as an anticipated, accelerated result having earned his pardon. And one would
assume that having come to the point of the sacred Podkoolad he realized whatever it
means to be a particle, albeit, an independent one. So for me it’s a big question as to why
Gurdjieff chooses to carry that theme of independent individuality all the way back to
the council of sacred Podkoolads. Because that, for me, has to do with the question of
what it means to have what we call real I and what that means in terms of an independent
individuality seems, at least in the context of The Tales, and that he starts with that and
seems to also end with that as the theme. In a sense that is also I think why it first struck
me because the Work in my youthful impression of the state of the world when someone
put In Search in my hand, the one statement that came out of that was that the world is
the way it is because you are the way you are. At that time the question of how am I and
am I just mechanical, am I really? Am I not just the machine and wholly mechanical so in
that is the striving for independence to not just be the machine. So there’s that question.
Participant: But isn’t that starting to be not wholly mechanical?
Participant: At that point in my life, at that age, there was some primary emotional
imagery that was placed in me by my Roman Catholic upbringing. That was the judgment
upon which I was making on the world and the judgment about feeling that the people
should not behave this way, we should not treat others that way. It shouldn’t be like this
you see. It shouldn’t because after all Jesus and his wonderful model for what it means to
be a decent human being. So there’s a conflict in the mind of a young person and these
people are telling me all these things, the wonderfulness of the Christian message. If you
really believe that and this is all happening in the mind of a child so at that place for me,
there is a part of me that doesn’t want to be that way, I want to have my own I. I want to
be an independent individual. Projecting that out in the service of anything, other than for
me, cannot be that way. It was not like my aim. My aim was to pursue this thread that I
had gotten on to and offered me a path.
Participant: So what is it today?
Participant: So your question now and the best that I can come to today is a point for
myself that I hold still to the question what does that mean to be an independent particle.
And I find as I continue work and as I continue to have relationships and put aside a part
of my life and dedicate it, to a reasonable degree of energy, to my relationships with other
people, other people in Work my emotional world has changed. As that happened, rela-
tionships have become more important. The quality of those relationships as I interact with
other people and the way I have decided to spend my time with my wife, every day with
others instead of with wood building things. It may be subjective for me but that has been a
growth thing for me. I feel like that is good, an expansion from where I was. But then to ask
the question does that have ultimate significance in the hugeness of this cosmos.
Participant: Maybe it is like sensing, having that capacity. I experience it as having agency
and that it has changed me in ways that I didn’t intend it to be. I wonder if it’s sort of like
sensing, in a certain way, as pathways are being developed. I don’t know.
Keith: It might be helpful to go all the way back in terms of the unfolding of the Universe
to the point when matter or mass as we ordinarily describe it, as it is present in our Universe.
When that first appeared and one of the interesting and remarkable aspects to a proton is

90
that all protons are the same. Think of that. Of the billions and billions of galaxies that are
now known to be in our Universe, all of the protons that are out there, every proton in the
Universe is the same. There is nothing distinct about this proton or that proton.
In the early, early stages of Creation the protons began to hook up and there is so much
energy that two protons collided with such force that it overcame the rejection force of that
proton towards another proton, since both are positive charges they reject each other. But
when they come together under conditions of such enormous energies that are greater than
the rejecting energies of their surface structures, they blend together. So now you have ma-
teriality appearing that has two protons.
We will leave aside the questions of neutrons for now because you could say in one sense
that neutron is a proton with an electron added to it. The electron has been incorporated
into the neutron so the charge on it is neutral and its mass is slightly larger than a proton,
which is the truth. Whether it really happened that way or not, we don’t know. Physics is
unable to give us an answer. They answer in terms of the kind of quarks. Ups and downs in
the case of protons and neutrons; an up and a down quark produce a proton, and a down and
an up quark produce a neutron. You can make of that whatever you will, but the important
thing to see is that proton and neutrons become the building block, the singular building
block for the world of mass-based materiality with the neutron. Especially with the neutron
because now once you have reduced the pressures and temperatures of these collisions to
such a degree that they can move apart, to a degree; they are still one. One thing is that there
are other protons out there and other protons that have come together with other protons so
there are a bunch of ‘two protons’ running around. And there are many, many more and out
of every hundred there are ninety-eight that are still just protons.
Over time as heat and energy diminishes and more and more collisions take place that
are able to stay after the collision, in a new state of coming together, now, we have the
building blocks that can build more complex mass-based materialities, things that have more
protons in them and begin to have more neutrons in them. In each case what has to be over-
come are the rejecting forces that are already there inside of the proton and the neutron. So
you have to overcome a certain energy level to incorporate another one and for that you
need a lot of energy. For that what you need is a sun.
Suns become the factories, if you will, the chemical factories to manufacture the atomic
table. Early suns now we can take pictures of them astronomically and they have been
able to identify suns that are very, very old. What they find is that it is also possible because
of the characteristics of the light bands that they produce make it possible for us to identify
the substances that are in the radiant energy. For instance you can with appropriate tele-
scopic apparatuses look at our sun and you can tell from the spectra that are broadcast, which
elements are in the outer layers of the sun. On the basis of the spectrographic characteristics,
which has to do with the refraction of light through the electron shell structures of that sub-
stance, those are identifiable things now. So what we find is that it is possible to see that
the whole atomic table begins to be created within suns. And within a sun it can generate
sufficient energy, sufficient force to bring together and fuse together the inner nuclei of
these new elements up to iron–not beyond. Why? The nucleus is too big and it requires too
much energy to overcome, to bring it together and build even bigger materialities, mass-
based materialities.
For that you need a supernova, in other words you have to go back up the scale of
energies to where you have an immense increase in the total amount of energy, such that
with a supernova, which is a sun itself, suddenly exploding on itself and exploding with such

91
high energies that it forces iron to come together and add more onto itself. You see the
environment is such that it overcomes the resistance on the shell of the iron nucleus, if you
will. So we begin to build within the metallic series–eventually we build all the way to the
end of the series that we have. But that only happens with this secondary creative push that
arises from supernova explosions. That cannot happen on an ordinary sun like ours. In its
whole life it will never be able to generate the upper end of the atomic table.
So what we have in terms of the atomic table that is on that upper end has come from
other supernovas elsewhere in the Universe. All of that materiality gradually gets congealed
by gravitational attraction around what became our sun, so our and all suns that became the
planetary worlds includes the materialities of the entire atomic table of many, many other
suns, so all these expressions, that we are stardust, are absolutely true and all other life-forms
are a part of that materiality.
In all of these differentiations, in the whole of the atomic table, the proton is the same,
absolutely the same–whatever galaxy you choose, the proton is the same. Calculating the
length of time of the Universe, which sounds paradoxical and is, but that is the best they have
been able to discover. It is incredibly long lived. It remains an individual.
Participant: I think it is when he tells us about time and every drop of water in that glass,
there is there also a full, independent world full of microcosmoses. When I look at that
decanter I just see water. So there is something about that same perception that I just see
water, but each little drop of water, each little bead, perceives its own independent world.
To me this is an example that is like this.
Participant: Well I thought it might be helpful to look at the paradox that we have been
trying to address–the individuality, commonality and the uniqueness–and yet not being
unique at all. Because in our Universe we see unlimited examples of what appear to be
uniquenesses. When you go deeply, deeply into them and see how they are built you finally
end up at the very bottom. You end up with a uniqueness that is always the same.
Gurdjieff says this about all of the great visitors that have been sent here with a mission.
In the exercises that we do, the full quadrant exercises, we place into the four limbs–blessed
Moses, Mohammed, the Buddha and Jesus in one form of that and, this is all my body. This
is why we sense it this way. He is saying something very explicit here. They are not different.
This is my arm, this is my leg, this is part of my body and yet these representatives, these
great saints, that come to the Earth and I ask them to strengthen my being. This is recog-
nizing the uniqueness of sameness. They are all the same–all these saints. At one point some-
body may remember where this is, where Gurdjieff said exactly that all these great figures
that visited the Earth, they are all the same. They are unique and yet separate.

Participant: You are unique just like everyone else.

Participant: We can all have unique expressions of the same thing.
Participant: Okay – should we stop for cocktail hour?

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October Gathering 2016 ~ Saturday Evening

Keith: While we were eating supper, a number of really interesting questions came up,
a number of interesting observations, that I thought might be useful for us to carry on
in the evening here. The subject of modern neurosciences is tremendously interesting.
What science, through its various forms of investigation, found in the last 25-30 years in
imaging techniques applied to the brain into the peripheral nervous system to biochemistry
of the brain really turned up some very remarkable insights into the nature of the brain.
We talked about how the studies at the University of Wisconsin have verified the areas of
the brain that are so intimately concerned with meditation and the concentration of certain
emotional states. There is a great deal there that has been explored and more that is begin-
ning to be explored since then.
However (and this is the big “however” that led us back to our conversation at the table),
no neuroscientist today would say what is the nature of an image? We open our eyes; we
smell, we taste, we touch. We do those things and we call them what they are. We say, “I
see this; I taste this; I touch that.” But the image of the thing is completely, completely
unknown.1
I want to emphasize this over and over so we go away with a clear notion that the nature
of the images that the brain forms–when you are looking at me here or when you are looking
at each other, those visual images, they are obviously not me and they are not these people,
they are images of these people. They are reconstructions, creations, if you will, of the brain
on the basis of information that it receives from its various receptors, vision, taste, smell, etc.
But the nature of the image–to say that it is an electromagnetic field that we can explore and
we can study and measure–nonsense. It is not that. We do not know what it is. No scientist
in his right mind today would ever say that we know what an image is.
The origin of image is an important thing to keep in mind in terms of its importance
for our Work. What is it that can form the image? What is the nature of the image that is
formed? That is one aspect of it.
The second aspect of it, which is equally as mysterious, and for which we have no ex-
planation from a scientific point of view, is what is the real nature of consciousness? What
is consciousness? How does modern neuroscience approach that issue, that question? They
approach it with total confusion, total disagreement among themselves as to how even to
ask the question, what is consciousness? Some claim that there is no such thing. Some very
eminent scientists feel that consciousness is a figment of our imagination. It is a biological
by-product of the way we are humans, which doesn’t explain anything but at least it gets
them out of trying to offer some explanation for the nature of consciousness.
Even more frustrating, in a sense, is what is the nature of attention? Leave off its
relationship to consciousness, that attention can be unconscious– can we have uncon-
scious attention? It seems we can. But what is the nature of that attention? Gurdjieff
has this question in Life is Real, what is this “sameness”? He calls it that; he doesn’t give
us much help in that direction. He asks what is this “sameness” that is present in the in-
tellect, in the emotions and in the physical body, the three brains? What is this sameness
that they share that can bring about a true reconciliation? This is attention. He is referring
to, I believe, attention.

1 Buzzell, Explorations in Active Mentation, “Image as Man’s Three-brained Reality,” pp 85-97

93
 What is the nature of that attention?2 Ask the scientists. We don’t know. They don’t know
what the nature of that attention is.
So the conclusions that we come to here about the nature of these [image and attention],
because we can substantiate them; we can give examples of how they function, doesn’t give
us an explanation of what they are in themselves but it certainly carries us a distance in terms
of function, being able to deal with these notions usefully. It puts us worlds ahead of the
scientific community because we can talk about attention because we have experienced it
and we know clearly what we are referring to when we speak to each other about attention.
And there is so much we learn from that, when we apply attention, for instance, to sensing,
as we did this morning in the exercise that Mr. Adie took us through. That requires attention
to identify the limbs, inside of the nervous system, to find your leg or your foot.
And as was pointed out earlier, we don’t really find our foot out there; we find the foot
in here [gestures to brain]. This exploration through sensing is going on inside of us, is going
on inside of the brain. It’s not going on in the foot in spite of what we feel. And I am just
as convinced, as you are that, when I sense my foot, I am sensing my foot, that thing down
there. But I am sensing it in the brain. I can prove that in the experiments that have been
done in so many places, that, by fixing attention on a particular arena of action like what I
mentioned that these Buddhist priest do when they meditate on happiness, for example, then
a certain part of their brain lights up. When we give attention to certain things like sensing
your foot, a certain part of the brain lights up. A certain part of the motor-sensory cortex will
light up that is the end result of paying attention to it. It isn’t anything that has happened
to the foot at that moment, other than your attention. So, obviously, it is the attention that
has made that a possibility. So we can explain to ourselves and justify to ourselves the great
power that attention has even though we have difficulty taking about is nature.
What the Symbol form offers is an opportunity, not a final answer, to begin to understand
from where this must come. It must come from a certain level in our understanding of the
cosmos and of the Worlds above our World. It must raise the question of how high up does
that energy come from that can be so able to penetrate into something, to focus on it and to
make efforts to understand it at the same time, to go into it, to attempt to take it apart to see
its relationship to other things–all of this comes from the three powers of attention: seeing
something, seeing something divided into two and then having the question, what in the
world is it and what is it related to and how does it function?
When we have those three powers of attention, notice that the third power is the creative
power in our ordinary world. We create something when we pay attention to something–
something comes out of that. We suddenly notice what it is. We give it a name or we come
back to it and say that this is significant; I’ve got to pay attention to this because it relates to
this or this or this … It is the attention that has been the creative energy that made pos-
sible that relationship. I believe all relationships that we see in science or in music or in
art or in philosophy–they are all expressions of the third power of attention, namely, building
relationships, creating relationships, seeing those things that are perhaps already there but
unmanifested or created anew.
The Symbol form gives us a way of at least asking the question from what level do
these come? Clearly an image can be looked into. We can study an image. We can bring
our attention to the image. Clearly, the image is separate from the attention or we could say
it the other way around that the attention is separate from the image. The image is a
2 Buzzell, A New Conception of God, “Attention, The Greatest Gift to Life, pp 280-99

94
product. Image is something that is created, constructed in us and it is the end result that
the attention, then, can be brought to bear on that image, although not necessarily. There
are many images that are formed, there are many smells out there, there are many sounds
and visual things and we only register–pay attention–to a very small portion of them. If you
think of all the functions of all of your five external senses on any given day, we register only
a very small proportion of all of them–all that can be seen, heard, touched–very little.
So the attention becomes the instrument on a higher level that makes it possible to look
into to study image, to learn about its nature and the third power of, to create. We create
images with our attention. You can close your eyes and create an image, an image of one of
your children or one of your children when they were born. You can remember and form
an image of what they looked like. You have created something that then is in front of you.
You are looking at that, you see that image, nobody else can see it but you have created that
inside of you. How did you do that? With your attention–the third power of attention makes
it possible to do that–to create that image.
Second Conscious Shock

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Mechanical Feeling and Sensation
(External Senses, Endocrine System and Oxygen)

In a sense, image is on a lower level that is why I put it at a level of ‘hydrogen’ 24. All
images, as we can see on the enneagram, all ‘hydrogen’ 24s are images. If they are images
of the physical body, if they come out of that aspect of our first brain and early second brain,
then they are images that belong to la24. True emotional images only happen with the be-
ginning digestion of air in its upper stages when we pass from mi48. Remember we talked
about going from the solar plexus to the chest into the true emotional center, from the lower
or physical emotional center, ‘hydrogen’ 48. Higher is ‘hydrogen’ 24. This is an image that we
call our feeling states, these are higher emotions when you feel Love or Faith, Hope in any
of its varieties of states, that’s an image, that’s an emotional image so it is a 24 because it is an
image. Image is something that is created by the event or from the event by some aspect of
the nervous system; namely, the emotional brain inside of us and it creates that image which
we experience as a feeling, a higher feeling in this case.

95
 So we put this down in the Air Octave as a 24 but now, since it is past the mi–fa, because
it has been attended to–attention has been brought to the point of the initial incoming im-
pression that was physical, so it starts at the digestion of food and in the digestion of food we
must pass through this first. So we will get a kind of gut, emotional impact from many of life’s
events in the digestive process of air, but that can lead to higher emotion, with attention,
bringing attention to it–what is the significance of this feeling state? I have sudden concern
for my child or my wife; I have sudden interest and I feel very good about hearing that they
have won the prize or they have successfully completed the course or whatever, whatever it
is that we can then move into the world of relationship, the self-other world and then feel
into the world that we share. Whenever that happens, all of those feelings belong to higher
emotion–they belong to hydrogen 24. This is at fa24. They are in that category, which we
can attend to, we can recognize with attention.
The third category, the do-re of impressions, again, it dependent upon attention but
keep in mind in the three octaves of digestion, the do–re–mi of each octave takes place
outside the body to be served, which means the physical food when we eat food and we
swallow that food into the stomach and that goes into the small intestine, it is not in the
body yet. It is not in the body that it is to serve until it crosses the membrane in the small
intestine and enters the bloodstream. It must get into the blood before it is truly food for
they physical body because we could always loose it through diarrhea, vomiting, etc., and
they would never have been in the body.
So that is true in the Air Octave as well. do-re-mi of Air is not in the body to be served.
What is that body to be served? Kesdjan, the world of self-other relationship, that is the body
that should be served but the preliminary steps are outside that body, which is why we can
say they are ‘gut’ they are initial, emotional impacts that we feel. They can be pleasant or
unpleasant, positives or negatives, it doesn’t matter–this is what matters–what we make of
it relative to relationship. Again, we enter this world of self-other relationship.
Only with the attention do we begin to see the significance of it. We begin to experience
the significance of it when it reaches the level of fa24.
Participant: We can have emotional images without attention. Things come up or we can
picture things or we have emotions but you are saying they don’t have a certain amount of
significance.
Keith: In the second state of consciousness which is where we spend a large portion of our
life, all of our feeling states–I am not saying they are not real, they are real, but they don’t
have the possibility for transformation that Gurdjieff speaks about. They simply don’t. Why?
Because they are physical body–they are there to serve the physical body, they are not there
to serve the world of self-other relationships. If they don’t reach that level, then they don’t.
Now, I think the point of your question is don’t we sometimes have an experience that
is truly a fa24, that is in that they arc of Higher Emotion because we care very deeply or
we are really stunned by the emotional quality of what we experience. Yes, absolutely.
Remember that the attention comes from shocks. This is whole purpose of the first shock.
It is called an “artificial” shock, a conscious shock, the first conscious shock. It is artificial.
Artificial, why? Because nature doesn’t provide it, it has to be provided from us, the use of
our attention.
There are times when the shock is such that it will cross that barrier and then the mi48
will pass to fa24 and we have that experience and it’s genuine and it’s real. How long does it

96
persist and does it have a spreading influence on other aspects of Higher Emotion? That’s the
‘iffy’ part because it came from an accident to begin with. It did not come from the attention
being held on it in which we try to build something. So it is part of a digestive process that
we are involved in so far as effort over time, that’s one thing because then it can go further;
it can proceed further in the Air Octave. If it is accidental, then it is kind of willy-nilly; it
depends. Maybe it does; maybe it doesn’t.
The nature of do–re24 here in the Western world, say in the last three hundred years
especially, there has been a great deal of attention given to the education of the mind, a
great deal of value given to higher education, the study of the accumulated wisdom of the
capacities and skills whether it is in music, philosophy, mathematics, there has been a great
deal more attention has been given to that aspect of the third brain in the intellectual sense
than there was before then. I say that and I assume it is uncontested as there was plenty of
intellectual activity before. All I am saying is that it seems to me evident that there is more
in the last several hundred years, since the time of Newton because this is also the time
of some of entry of Western music as we understand it, begins about the same time with
the Italian composers, the early Church music and all that develops from that. The same
is true in poetry, in fact it is more true in poetry and music and drama–those three areas
in particular are often have been predecessors of scientific insight. There are things we
look back on now in 1860-1880 in the arena of music, poetry and philosophy that are clearly
of the age of relativity, clearly insights into the quantum nature of the world with all of its
indefineableness and so forth. And it is there 20 years before Einstein comes.
That is what I am saying; there is a power of attention often through the emotional
world. We see things appear in the creative arena that really presaged, predate some of
the scientific discoveries years later.
In any event, the do-re in the Intellectual Octave can be totally automatic; it can all
become, we would identify, as la24. In other words, in the physical Food Octave, it is all
of the automaticities that affect the third brain. And there is a lot of them, for instance, the
learning of language in the particular culture you are born into. That is not something that
requires a great deal of effort, a conscious effort. It requires time and repetition as we see
in early childhood.
There is a great deal of stuff that occurs that becomes legitimately a part of our physical,
automatized nature that we would say is intellectual. It is formatory so, in that sense, it is, in
Gurdjieff’s description, a formatory apparatus. A formatory apparatus is like a switch board;
it gives answers, things are plugged in–that is exactly what la24 does, it is a formatory, auto-
matic physically conditioned kind of repository of bits and pieces of information and data
but not understanding. do–re in that arena is what is accomplished in life when one goes
to school.
If one goes beyond that and has a discovery, say, when they are 14 or 15 years old that
they have a sudden passion for understanding in biochemistry, the nature of stars, whatever,
then they begin to pursue. When they begin to pursue that makes fundamental use of the
focused attention, whatever it happens to be, music or philosophy or science, it doesn’t make
any difference, any human endeavor in which there is this focused use of the intellectual
intelligence, a question of what is going on here? We can ask that in a scientific way, or a
musical way or a philosophical way, poetic way­– in all of those ways–that will produce certain
things because the attention that is brought into that arena is creative. Something will result.
Sometimes that is a very remarkable creation as it was, for instance, with Einstein. Many
other people won Nobel prizes but many people have had moments or periods in their life

97
when because of the use of focused attention, they were able, in the face of a question,
of how does this work or what’s going on here–they were able to put down on paper or in
musical or poetic form, some insight into that level. That’s mi12. That is coming to really
using the attention in a creative sense, coming to something that is new, something that is
the creative result of bringing the attention to bear on a question. It is fundamentally,
primarily an intellectual exercise, rather than an emotional enterprise. That is way to
qualify the 12s and the 24s that are here in this particular form of the enneagram.
Participant: I am wondering how do we see the separation of Abrustdonis and Helkdonis
in this from Askokin?
Keith: Good. I just talked it out. It is talking out what produces fa–re24 and mi–sol12.
When it is in the Air Octave, whatever the image formation is in Higher Emotional Center
and then the creative result we come to, in terms of understanding the emotional nature
requirement and how to respond to that, then all of that is in the Abrustdonis, in the trans-
formation through conscious labor and intentional suffering. Conscious labor is the use of
the attention in this arena. The intentional suffering is the discovery of what was not there­–
our lacks in that regard–when we see that we did not know, we did not feel; we suddenly
felt our absence. We felt ashamed of not having met that requirement or that need or that
opportunity. And from that comes the conscious labor and the conscious labor is what creates
the images of Higher Emotion that we can share but then the states themselves often cannot
be for that individual, they are…
Participant: When that individual has that attention, can we say that that passion comes
from will?
Keith: Oh yes, we haven’t discussed the important role that this plays because as it comes
about, except it comes from two levels above–sol48 to produce 24. So we can ask ourselves
questions about this in that sense so that Six (H6, the will) would be necessary to produce
this. Notice that Will (H6) acts on image (H24). Our will, whatever we come to, is not suf-
ficient. It is not sufficient to carry us over an important transition to real I. That Will, as far
as I understand it, must come from outside, must come from higher yet.
Participant: Is that ‘Aiëirittoorassnian-contemplation’3 something coming from Above?
Keith: Yes, a prayerful Grace for entry that man doesn’t have access to. Nothing is owed
us from that world. It comes unbidden in a sense.
Participant: That’s like when the impressions …
Keith: Serve the Will, yes. As soon as we enter that octave I think this is the Will. This
is the point where real I appears, the transformation of man is placed in that way.
Participant: Why not say World Three instead of World One because Three is the next
one up?
Keith: Okay. [laughter]
Participant: With the second conscious shock, my experience is the point where we
recognize and experience another relationship that we are in relationship to something

3 Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales, p 569

98
higher that is a way to help us if we can ask in the right state simultaneously feeling the
wish and the need and my helplessness and then to ask for help. And then there can be
the experience of the reality of this higher something having a relationship with me and
needing me as I also need it. At that point, the ego needs to step aside. If it’s anywhere
in the picture, the quest cannot be sincere and what happens won’t be of the same quality
– it will be more myself answering myself.
Participant: It is interesting because we are talking about fa6 just how all the examples
we used were about the higher and lower blending for the middle. World One is not shown
there but it’s clearly implied. The will is the representation of endlessness within us–the
free attention or the free will.
Keith: That’s true but it also goes in other representations. You can carry this outer circle
all the way around until it comes to its si–do and then in some of the representations I
think Gurdjieff has given us a hint in that direction because these are the higher degrees of
Reason. The sacred Podkoolad is next to the sacred Anklad but below that is what? Degin-
dad and Ternoonald. So we could take Ternoonald, Degindad, Podkoolad, Anklad because
he steps these out as higher degrees closer to his endlessness, as steps in that process of
that final octave. In other words, they all have Will, all of these characters, as he has talked
about them, all of them are presumptively in possession of their own Will but they are
higher in ranking relative to endlessness.

Simultaneity of Real I
our Attentions

MI 12 FA6 Higher
Degrees
SOL12 DO 768 FOOD of Reason
LA6

SI 12 RE384

RE24 sensory motor Sacred Ischmetch

FA 24 Being
LA 24 Intellectual MI192

Will Degindad
motor sensory
Being Being
Physical
Feeling (moving)
Ternoonald
sensory motor DO192
AIR
DO48
IMPRESSIONS SOL 48 FA96 Podkoolad

MI 48 RE96
non-
mass mass Anklad

Lower Centers (moving,

Keith: We will take up the hunt tomorrowFood,
feeling, thinking)
morning.
Air and Impressions Octaves
Higher Emotional Center
Participant: And it should give usCenter
Higher Intellectual something to dream about tonight.
Keith: Let’s hope, let’s hope.

99
October Gathering 2016 ~ Sunday morning
Keith’s opening remarks at the close of our gathering

Keith: In closing our time together, I want to talk about how the one view, and this is the
view that has evolved over the last 25-30 years of this symbolic representation of the whole
Ray of Creation [A Symbol of the Cosmos and Its Laws] that nowhere specifically that I have
been able to find, in any of what Gurdjieff has put on paper, is there a discussion of man’s
evolutional triadic change lawfully other than simply the description that comes from the
Ray of Creation where life begins from the sun of the particular solar system where World 24
is the world that gives form to that life but the energy and the creative insight comes from
the sun of that solar do system and then that creative energy and creative insight into the
form the life must take that comes from the level of the sun but it must take on a body. So,
in progressing into World 24, into the planetary world, it leaves the radiant energy levels of
the sun and enters into the mass-based world of atoms and molecules. For me, that is one
way of looking at the whole of World 24.
The whole of the planetary world is a world of molecules and atoms and the energies that
are appropriate to that level that have to do with what drives the interactions between atoms
and molecules. On the Earth, we are privileged to have representations, for instance, of the
entire atomic table. Other planets may not have that at all. Other planets in our own solar
system may have many elements of the atomic table, investigations at this point in time seem
to indicate that that is the case but not in the same proportions that we have on Earth. There
may be oceans of cyanide on some of the planets and moons of this solar system, something
that is inconceivable for us. A fluid level of oceans or lakes on other planets, in our concep-
tion, we would always think in terms of water. But to have some other substance of a plan-
etary nature, of atoms and molecules, in some liquid form that plays a role on that particular
planet similar to what water plays on the Earth, that is a very new idea, something that has
only entered into the consciousness or awareness of man in recent years.
In any event, at the level of World 24 or the planetary world, that is where the elemen-
talness, the atoms and molecules that will come to form the substrate of life, that all draws
from World 24, the planetary world and, given the guidance and energy coming from the
sun which I believe that form is best expressed, in our terms, as the ultimate enneagram.
The enneagram is the ultimate symbolic ex-
pression of the Laws of life. What we see then World 24
sol
is the appearance, first on the planet Earth in Planetary World la fa
the Lateral Octave as you step down from the sol
do si
do of sun, the si of the planetary world and do la

then the la-sol-fa. si

la
sol
do fa
When Gurdjieff speaks of la-sol-fa, he
never elaborates this; he leaves it up to us to do
do
si
la
sol

have to struggle with it. To me the la is Micro-

cosmos. It is the first appearance of life. It is
the closest to the planetary world. It is the first do do
manifestation of the enneagrammatic lawful-
ness that underpins all of life.

100
 So the first manifestation is in
Lateral Octave
Microcosmos. That lasts for nearly
fa
four billion years. Just think of
Surplanetary The Great Turning
the experimentation that has to
to Brained Life go on, the looking into possibili-
t i o l–fa

ties, the rejection —the coming

l

Tetartocosmoses
na
o l u –so

into the life of forms that last for

i n v i–la

la fa
sol a very short period of time. Why?
–s

Microcosmos One-brained
do

Because they didn’t have all of the

si sol
components quite balanced, such
Two-brained
that they could continue life under
do la Three-brained the circumstances that they found
themselves in on the planet Earth.

a
so a l
l–f
i–l o n
si
In any event, after a very long

– s uti
Kesdjan Body

a–
do
period of experimentation and

do e v o l
Higher Being-body
complication, we come to this pe-
riod of time where one-celled life
Ascending Octave — Hope of ENDLESSNESS
begins to live closer and closer to
other forms of one-celled life.
And there comes a point a point in time when those lives begin to merge and then we
have the first appearance of what Gurdjieff calls “Tetartocosmos.” This is multi-celled life.
Try and contain in your mind for a moment (if you have any background in biology, it
helps) the enormous number of multi-celled beings, of Tetartocosmos on the planet Earth,
the varieties. It is incredible — thousands and thousands of species and that’s all part of
Gurdjieff’s Tetartocosmos, multi-celled life. What form that was and how we can identify it
now is very difficult because it was long before plants and animals. If you take plants and
animals out of the equation, and say you’ve got life and it’s multi-celled, what is it? It is not
a plant it is not an animal. It’s there and it’s still around; we have many species of multi-celled
life that doesn’t have a brain and isn’t a plant or a tree. We have many of those still with us:
mussels, clams, all forms of multi-celled life. Any form of life that we identify that creeps
and crawls around and doesn’t have a brain, that’s what I am talking about and there are lot
of them. That’s Tetartocosmoses.
At a certain point in the unfolding of life in its complexity there is a great divide. There
is unfolding in two directions. One direction takes us toward the world of plants (and I am
greatly simplifying this) because the great divide is towards that which has its basis in photo-
synthesis. The other unfolding is the early forms of brained beings from Tetartocosmos.
Both of these — the whole world of plants and the whole world of brained beings are
Tetartocosmos. They are still multi-celled. Everything on the Earth is multi-celled once you
get beyond Microcosmos we just call them differently. In any case, it is quite remarkable
when you think of this unfolding here into plants and into animals or brained beings.
The difference is that photosynthesis depends on the ability of digesting a photon and
taking that photon into a specific chemical that has a specific element in its center. Utiliz-
ing the energy of the photon, it is able to initiate an energy transformation process that leads
to carbonation; that leads to stringing carbon atoms together. That stringing of carbon atoms
together is what we see out there in plant life. In other words, the carbon underpinning of
plant life starts from photosynthesis. It is largely almost totally dependent on photosynthesis

101
but the chemical form that, when it has this specific molecule or atom in its center that is the
genius solution to photosynthesis, has on this side a chemical that is remarkably similar to
that which contains this remarkable or unique mineral atomic form only now it is a different
atomic form and that atomic form makes it possible for there to become a relationship, again
dependent on photonic energy that begins to develop and build on the sensitivity of the indi-
vidual cell structures to communicate with each other.
This is the basis of the nervous system; this is the basis of that which begins to evolve
towards a neural impulse and is based on the charges that are there on the exterior of the
cell. So as those become, over millennia, more and more sophisticated in the ways in which
they can communicate and share data about whether it’s food, an enemy, or something I
should move towards or away from, what is its climate, what is its temperature – all of those
things become possible ways in which this presence of plus and negative charges in nearly
infinite combinations surround the cell structures that have evolved up to that point in time
that are the Tetartocosmos. These begin to become organized, much like yesterday when we
talked about the organization of the neural impulse and the sodium-potassium etc.. In the
same creative way, the exploration now is to take that and build circuits with it so that the
communication between cells is not just with the charges that are proximate to each other
but now they begin to become separated from each other but still able to communicate.
How? Through the neural impulse–the impulse carries with no diminution of energy.
This is one of the most remarkable features that we still have in each of us. If you tested
the amount of energy that is present in that charge at the beginning of a nerve cell in your
brain, or in the lower part of your spinal cord going to the tip of your toes, there is a motor
fiber that goes all the way down. There is no loss of energy. When it arrives down there, that
impulse has the same potency as the impulse when it had its origin up in the spinal cord. In
our body, ordinarily, we don’t think of ourselves that way. We run out of steam; we run out of
gas. We have only so much energy and every manifestation uses up energy but here, in the
instance of the neural impulse, there is very little if any loss of energy in the neural impulse.
This is a truly miraculous development when it becomes possible to start building a system
that has almost no loss of energy in its transition from one place to another.
In any case, what begins to be built with the gradual growth and accumulation of neural
impulse communications is that these fibers become longer and longer and in that process
become more organized so that the fibers that are going to be involved with muscle cells
travel together; those that have to do with bring sensation back to the core are going to be
traveling together so we begin to see the evolution of sensory and motor fibers and those
themselves, not always but often, become combined into a nerve root that contains both
sensory and motor fibers–both those that are going out and those that are coming in.
So this process of organization leads, eventually, to the earliest forms of one-brained
beings. At the point, I believe we can go to Beelzebub where he tells Hassein the story of
what happens as life becomes more complex and he says finally this life form reaches a point
where the degree of individual tension is beginning to be reduced. At the same time these
life forms that have come into existence, what has evolved is the capacity to move indepen-
dently on the surface of the planet from one place to another. I’m sure you remember the
part in “Purgatory” where he discusses this where ‘independent automatic’ movement
begins to appear.
This is a pretty clear description of a one-brained being because a one-brained being
reaches a point where the primal triad of survival begins to have little breaks in it, little
openings in it where it doesn’t always have to be on guard. This is a critical point. This is

102
a point in “Purgatory” where Gurdjieff says endlessness becomes aware that this has
happened–that automatic, independent–what a clash that is–how many times do you have
to read that before you suddenly say, “Wait a minute, how can you say that something be
automatic and independent at the same time?” But Gurdjieff has done this. He says they
reach a point where there is automatic, independent movement on the surface of the planet
– on the surface, not in the ocean, on the surface; he is quite specific on that.
So automatic independent motion begins to appear and it appears under conditions
where the individual tension which I understand is if you are not totally on guard you are
going to be food for something–something is going to do you in–you are always alert for
survival. A chink has to appear, a little opening has to appear, where this little creature
that now has independent, automatic moving, however we understand that. It is interest-
ing that I can be automatic because when I move my legs and arms move automatically. I
don’t make each of them individually move from moment to moment, I just start off and
I am going to walk from here to there. So, I can walk independently, automatically —
independent in the choice of where I go. So when a creature reaches a point where it
is not every moment that it is afraid it is going to food for something, that is not going to
have its existence ended when it has a little time to simply look around and say, “Well,
I’ll go over there or maybe I’ll go over there.” Automatic, independent movement. I will
go here whereas this creature next to me may want to go there. And that’s okay because
there is this degree of independence that enters into the equation.
So when independent, automatic movement becomes established because the individual
tension has been reduced, then the next 3 to 4 pages of the chapter are an exploration of the
circumstances under which Kesdjan and Higher Being-body can be created. So compressed
in this very brief section you could say of The Tales, Gurdjieff has outlined in this progres-
sion from one-brained beings, two-brained beings, three-brained beings, independent mo-
tion and then, finally, the possibility of Kesdjan and Higher Being-body. And he speaks of
them exactly that way. This is first time (I think it is the first time) he mentions specifically
Kesdjan .
When he speaks about the appearance of automatic, independent movement, this is the
appearance of an early one-brained being. Notice that Gurdjieff says when endlessness
becomes aware of it. So it’s already happened. In the creative outflow of life on the planet
Earth from Microcosmos through Tetartocosmos to finally this initial step towards a brained
being and it’s all happened according to law. endlessness is not be aware of that at all, but
he becomes aware. Why? Because it is automatic and independent. It is the first appearance
in the whole of Creation of something that has the ability, the capacity to be independent.
This is a marvelous insight into the elementalness of
this appearance of independence. All Plant Life
The octave changes from this point. We have
The Great Turning
gone from do-si-la-sol-fa: fa
to Brained Life
la – Microcosmos;
sol
sol – Tetartocosmos;
la fa
fa – big opening, branching.
One branch of the fa becomes the whole of si sol
plant life, the whole of the vegetative kingdom, do la
and the other opening is towards brained beings.

103
 Both make elemental use of the photon. In one, the energy of the photon is used in
order to splice together certain mass-based portions of the world, namely carbon molecules
to space them together, to build something in the material world. And in the other direc-
tion, as we mentioned, the building of the eventual appearance of the nervous system.
So with the appearance, first of brained life there is, I believe one way of looking at it,
is that the octave, the la-sol-fa, the fa is the endpoint. It is coming to a fa-mi in its octave
(la-sol-fa-mi).
What is the mi? The mi in the Great Ray is where the Lateral Octave joins the Great
Octave. Mi is not a world of life; it is a world below the Lateral Octave of life–that’s the
moon. If World 48 contains life, the world of man, of three-brained beings, or brained
beings, then World 96 is the World under an even greater burden of law. It has more and
more restrictions, more and more restraint. It is the world of the moon.
Nothing happens on our Moon unless it is impact or radiant energy from outside. Here
the sun shines or some other body of planetary material collides with the Moon, which it is
does all the time and we see constant evidence of that now. That’s the only way the Moon
changes with the very interesting but rare circumstance of the naturally radioactive sub-
stances like uranium where it does become a lighter element, in other words, it moves up
in the atomic table, one widget when it transforms into lead but that’s it. In the Moon, what
can the Moon do to warm itself?
What can the Moon do to transform itself?
What energies does it have available to it?
It’s a totally dependent world, which is so closely related to what we have been exploring
about sensation. When we sense our body, if the planetary body is Moon relative to us in
the Earth–Moon–Anulios analogy that we explored, then Moon is our planetary body. When
we sense the planetary body, we are assisting in the creation of an atmosphere around the
physical body, a real atmosphere, a sensory atmosphere that is neural in its basis and we are
responsible for forming that.
In any case, we have left the world of life as we understand it when we go from World 48
to World 96, a totally dependent world that can do nothing for itself but must be helped from
outside if it is going to accomplish anything.
So the octave that we have been exploring, the la-sol-fa, when it goes to its mi, it rejoins
the Great Ray at the level of moon and then beyond to the negative Absolute in the Great
Ray.
Participant: I thought Moon was re. I thought the Earth was mi.
Keith: That’s one way of looking at it, yes. Also that Earth (48) is soil. I say that only because
we have this interesting exploration which Gurdjieff infers in a couple of places but doesn’t
go into and it has more to do with the creation of the Universe, something that we haven’t
gone into at all here, where, in consideration, we really have the Great Ray. Ordinarily when
we visualize it, we visualize it from the top down and what really is happening is that it is
going this way [indicates up?] also.
(The llustration on following page is from the foldout “The Utilization of Okidanokh” and
the images are referencing all of what Keith is referring to about evolutional and involutional
motions both automatic and independant.)

104
 PANEL 2b
A Symbol of the Cosmos DO
and Its Laws SI RE
in Triadic Form
The
Emanation LA MI FA MI

RE SOL

DO
LA SI LA

SOL FA
World Six
Okidanokh Enneagram
appears outside of SI of the
Holy Sun Absolute “Forced Need”
Djartklom of ENDLESSNESS

World Three
SOL Being

“First concentrations”
Divine
lead to World 12 Attention, Great Ray
Suns Will, Love do

si
DO
World One Lateral
la Octave

sol do

fa si
FA Organic Life
la sol fa
On Earth
mi mi
Planetary World
World 24 re re

Lateral
fa Octave
l
na

MI
tio

Earth sol
olu

World 48 la fa
inv

one-brained
two-brained
si
do sol
FA
la
l
na

SOL three-brained
tio
olu

Kesdjan
do Body
ev

SOL si
Higher
Being-body

By ordering worlds into higher RE

and lower levels of unfolding,
and by connecting these worlds World 96
in such a way as to make the Crystalline Moon
entirety of Creation an interde- ‘Moon‘
pendent one or whole, Gurdjieff
united the seemingly disparate
manifestations of humanity with
higher world laws. The Law of
Three Principles / Forces provides
the relational scaffold for this
unification.

105
 You have an involutional octave here which is how we usually visualize the Great Ray
from top to bottom. But really we have this other octave which is an evolutionary octave
which is starting and it must start close on to the same time as the involutional octave and
it goes around this way. So this is growing. As Gurdjieff says, the Moon is growing towards
an Earth; the Earth is growing towards a Sun. When he talks in those terms (as paradoxical
as that sounds), he is talking about this way of looking–that it is always progressing upward.
Looisos becomes an Archangel, he is angel but he becomes, because of his merits, an Arch-
angel so there is an evolutional possibility even for Looisos, with all the blunders that he
gets involved in.
Participant: How can it start at the same place if it begins here [where Keith indicated]
and the moon hasn’t appeared yet how does it go the other way at the same time as the
beginning?
Keith: Because … because I don’t know. [laughter] But one thing that we can see about it
is that if you take back at the moment of Big Bang or the moment of Creation of the entire
Megalocosmos, at that moment, what we usually picture, and what science usually puts
forward, is this incredibly, almost infinitely hot circumstance with incredible levels of energy,
1034 which has little meaning for us other than it is bigger than anything we can possibly
conceive of. From that beginning of pure energy, there begins the descent and that is what
usually is outlined and we can follow, surprising clearly, Gurdjieff’s unfolding of the Great
Ray when we follow that progression down from extremely high gamma to gamma and then
X-rays and ultraviolet–when we go through the whole spectrum of radiation, we go all the
way down to ELF waves.
However, in order for anything to happen along the way, for instance, for there to be
suns, you need materiality, you need mass. Where does that come from in this typical
picture of the Great Ray, there ain’t no mass?
Participant: When Beelzebub describes the creation of the Universe, doesn’t mass begin
with Okidanokh, when laws meet Etherokrilno, isn’t that the first materiality?
Keith: He doesn’t say that. Maybe that is your conclusion but it’s not what I understand.
Participant: That Okidanokh doesn’t appear at the beginning of the Megalocosmos?
Keith: No that is not what I said. You wanted to put mass in there.
Participant: Oh, I see, right, but what about materiality?
Keith: Same thing. What I am saying is the inference–if we are going to have an evolutional
octave is that we are going to try and conceive of, as well, as an involutional octave, we can
account for the involutional octave without much difficulty just by following the progression
of energy levels and so forth. The difficulty comes when we try and consider in that scenario
where the hell did mass come from? What I am saying, in Gurdjieff’s cosmology, I believe
he says it comes at the very beginning.
Mass appears and now, with all the modern physics that is involved in Big Bang which
is enormously complicated, this is the kind of stuff they are trying to explore with the high
collision business over in Switzerland and they have barely begun despite the spectacular
insights that they have come to. So far it just boggles the mind when you think of what they
have discovered so far. They are able to measure the existence of some of these states of

106
quarks and gluons existing for 14 quadrillionths of a second! What the hell does that mean?
14 quadrillionths of a second? And then they wink out, into what? They become something
more complex. From all this stuff that they are now considering in the Hadron Collider, and
you can call it stuff in the sense that it is all nuclear stuff. Eventually it comes down in our
world to protons, neutrons and electrons and energy, in our ordinary world. Granted there
is anti-matter and there are other things that have been investigated and proven to be real
but in our world as we live our lives, that’s it.
Mass appears, as I say in one conception, mass has to appear if it’s going to be a true
representative of a beginning evolutional octave, mass must appear very close to the
beginning and then it gains energy from the involutional triad so these two circles are
actually totally interrelated all along the way because one is feeding the other and feed-
ing back to the other at every step, so we can’t consider them to be totally separate.
But mass is the coalescence of enormously higher energies; it is the coalescence of
these bits and pieces of nuclear material, quarks and gluons and other kinds of sub-
atomic particles. At a certain point in time, they estimate to be somewhere around 500
million years after Big Bang, the temperature and pressures have diminished to such a
degree that we move from what is called a “dark Universe” to a “white Universe” mean-
ing that photons, light waves of all various vibratory wave lengths, before this time, they
cannot travel very far before they are absorbed, or they bump into, or bounce off of, so
they cannot go in a straight line because there is just too much stuff, they keep bump-
ing into everything.
At a certain point, as the temperature drops, more space appears. Space is created
and now it reaches a point, about 400 million years after Big Bang, where the temper-
ature drops to such a degree that now space has opened up between all the particulate
stuff that’s up there and now photons, light waves, can travel freely.
What we see in the microwave background (we have seen these pictures in the
newspapers) that these are microwave pictures, true pictures of the state of affairs of
the Universe, Megalocosmos, at that point in time because that light started traveling
and before then it couldn’t travel so you have a dark Universe prior to that time because
there was too much energy, too much matter in formation but, finally, matter forms and
this is where the mass comes from. The mass now is now in a final coagulated form of
protons, neutrons and electrons which are the substrate of the Universe so far as we
know it. This leaves aside the big questions about dark matter and dark energy and so
forth; we won’t touch on those at all. I am just trying to create an image that is quite
consonant with Gurdjieff’s that, indeed, these mass-based particles are an evolutional
octave that will become more and more conscious.
The elemental consciousness that is present in the constituents of atoms, in other words
on the inside of the protons, the quarks and gluons, represents the level of intelligence that
this level of matter has. Intelligence is the capacity to be aware of an ability to respond to.
However we define that, in the end, it comes to down to this–it is the degree of sensiti-
vity toward, openness or awareness of and the ability to respond in some way, shape or form.

Participant: You were speaking about the Moon, about atmosphere and about sensing
I thought you were going somewhere with that.
Keith: What I was trying to do was to complete, when we talk about the Lateral Octave,
we talk about the la-sol-fa and then the fa goes to mi (soil) in one conception when we

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pass beyond the Earth-based life but it is not really like that; it’s more like there is an
elementalness that is below that, that really is World 96 and below that yet is Negative
Absolute, which is the name Gurdjieff uses in associating the primal state of affairs is
with the Negative Absolute which is interesting because of the Negative and Positive
Absolute.
We can see this circumstance at the beginning of the creation of Megalocosmos is that
there must be participating in this both the positive and the negative of World Three, say.
Then one representative of that that is very obvious to us would be the enormously high
energy, the intelligence, the consciousness that starts the involutional cycle that leads from
World One to World Three to World Six to World 12 and so forth down. But, at the same
time, there is this mass-based that begins in the Negative Absolute and then progresses
through Negative Absolute to Moon.
Participant: So in that evolutionary sequence there is la-sol-fa, and then there is a bifur-
cation that one la-sol-fa goes into plant life and the other la-sol-fa goes into brained life.
Keith: Well they all come out of Tetartocosmos; we shouldn’t see it as two different things.
Participant: At the sol.
Keith: Yes there is an opening from Tetartocosmos in those two great directions.
Participant: So there is that bifurcation there. So to go from the fa to the mi can you say
something about the nature of the shock that comes in there?
Keith: Death is what comes in there that leads from the level of … when we take la-sol-fa,
if the fa is plant life it is when the plant dies; when it is towards brained life, it is when the
brained life dies. Because then the body is elemental and it goes back to the Earth (soil),
and back finally to the Moon because it is cannot do anything for itself.
Participant: So death is a shock at that point. Gurdjieff’s admonition to [remember death].
Keith: We call it death–it’s the passage from living la-sol-fa to non-living which is still an
elemental part of the Universe. But in the conception we are trying to explore here, we have
to try to see it also as an evolving part rather than just a product of death and it’s going down,
down, down and actually the results of this motion is up, up, up because, with every life form
that does come into life, what does it build its body on? If you take every human being, in
utero it takes from the Earth, it takes from non-living into itself and incorporates that into its
living-ness. That’s evolution, that’s moving up. That’s an important aspect here.
I want to complete this thing about the turn because, to my knowledge, unless someone
can point it out to me, Gurdjieff doesn’t talk about this; he doesn’t talk about the fact that
when endlessness becomes aware of automatic, independent movement, he then acts.
This is endlessness entering the Creation. That’s against the law, supposedly.
No, he doesn’t enter the Universe with material power. That’s the answer; he enters with
consciousness. Such a beautiful image when you suddenly see that’s what brained beings are
all about. It is a mechanism to bring consciousness into the world of itself–consciousness of
itself, of its whole world. And sensing plays a very essential part in our obligation down, to
help that world.

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Participant: Can we back up a little? Where did you leave off before you spoke of sensing?
Keith: Where I was leaving off was that it is important to see that this is a shift in the octave.
We said la-sol-fa and then, the implicit mi going through plant life or early organic brained
life is to the mi of World 96.
What I am saying is the octave shifts. It starts going back up again. Having been an
involutional octave la-sol-fa, that is involutional, it is moving down, with the appearance
of brained life and when endlessness sees the possibilities, possibilities for what? For
assisting him in the administration of the enlarging Universe, then he’s got to build the
brains. The appearance of the first brain is one thing but now something has to participate
in the building of consciousness and that is the entry of endlessness into Creation, enter-
ing not with anything to affect the materiality of the Universe but affecting the potential
for consciousness.
So that shift from the
Enfolding into
Kesdjan la-sol-fa, the fa now turns
la
3BB
and moves to sol. It turns
48
in its own octave. Instead
si
48 do of going down to mi—it
12 KB
fa
48 48

24 24 la sol
HBB 3BB turns around and begins
24
fa to move back up again. It
12
do
si sol moves from fa to sol and
12 la
12 3BB that is two-brained beings.
12
6
3
6 do si
12 KB
With la, it moves up to
HBB 3BB
Enneagrammatic circle
three-brained beings and
6 1 6
12 3 3 12 of the Kesdjan Body then to si – Kesdjan, the
12 6 6 12 fourth state of conscious-
12 12 12
Enneagram of ness and finally the si-do.
Three-Brained
Beings Do of that inner octave
which is going back up
again; from the turn to
brained beings, finally to
three-brained beings and
then to Kesdjan and the
KB: Kesdjan Body
3BB: Three-brained Being
enfolding to Kesdjan is
HBB : Higher-being Body where the Laws have to
become cut in half.
When you enter World 24 (the orange triads), remember that in other considerations
Gurdjieff discusses, we become free of half the laws; one is no longer under the most phy-
sically imposed and difficult laws of World 48–you become free of half the laws so you are
now under the laws of World 24. That enfolding of half the laws — how do you do that?
Again, we have a way of representing that here.
In the symbolic form, because they are each enneagrammatic, they are going to be six
major steps. There is going to be re-mi-fa-sol-la-si. So there are going to be six laws or six
sites in us or however we understand that and when we go from World 48 to World 24, we
are going to cut those in half. So, the possibility I saw was that you cut them in half when
you take two of those laws of a three-brained being, two of the six fundamental laws of a
three-brained being and you enfold them and they become each other. In this you have
taken six laws and formed three laws.

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 In World 24, when one has a completed Kesdjan Body, a man then has his own Law of
Three. The six have become three.
So the enfolding of the six laws in World 48 of a three-brained being become three laws
of the Kesdjanian World and those three laws then folds further in, along the sides that are
available to it. That is one of the rules I have tried to follow in seeing how the Symbol has
evolved over time. You have to follow the laws that are built into the sides that if you are go-
ing to rotate over the side, you can’t keep rotating over the same side, you’ve got to do it on
three sides eventually. It’s one of the reasons if you look closely at the la-sol-fa, you’ll notice
that they form in the unfolding on the triads of the Symbol form that the la-sol-fa and then
go to two-brained and then three-brained and you suddenly have six triads that are circling
around one point. If you go back to World One or World 12, the sun, and have a question,
what is the one [point]? The one is the physical body. All six of these forms, la-sol-fa, one-,
two- and three-brained beings all need a physical body; so the triad, the apex is shared. All
six of them share the need for a physical body and then that three-brained being triad has
nowhere up to go; it must fold away from that dependence on a physical body; it doesn’t
need a physical body at that point in time so it enfold into the etheric world or the world of
Kesdjan, which has no need of a physical body.
So it is an interesting way of seeing that, when we look at the lateral octave this way, we
can see la-sol-fa and see the progression of the involutional octave but can also see that it can
turn and it turns with the introduction of brained beings and then it is an ascending octave
that has its own ascent to si in World 24 and finally to do, which is in World 12. The highest
octave here would be in World 12.
Interestingly, when you look at the Symbol form, the apex of World One for us or the
apex of that World 12 triad that apex touches an apex of World One. The reason this is im-
portant is that the final enfolding, if you take the physical, emotional and intellectual as poles
in the three-brained being-ness.
To get to Kesdjan, there is a requirement that we must blend certain laws in us. What I
mean by that is that there are laws that have to do with Creation and there are laws that have
to do with things happening but not necessarily Creation. If there is Creation, there has to
be Interaction. Interaction doesn’t create anything; it just produces a lot of moving around.
Energy moves things around but in the end, you still have the things that got moved around.
They just may end up in a different place in a different arrangement but they are still the
same thing. That is different from Creation where you create something and what you end
up with is really new, like a baby, like a whole human being. So Interaction is just like us
meeting you; we interact, we communicate with each and we will all go home and we will be
the same people, the same lawfulness. We were created this way and now we interact but it
seems like those two do not blend. But what if the requirement is that you must blend?
In order to enter the Kesdjanian world, you must blend Creation and Interaction; you
must blend Identity. It is like Creation, here is Identity; as Bennett would say, “I am a chair.
That’s what I am. Don’t take me for anything else.” That’s the triad of Identity. That is what
it is of itself, however small or limited that may be but that is what it is. That is the triad of
Identity that is the law. Everything has in its own way, its own identity. However then there is
the great law of Transformation or Digestion where something is going to become something
else, not identity; it’s going to take that identity maybe and digest it; it is going to take it apart
and make it into something else. How can you take something that is a source of identity and
change it, transform it into something else? To do this, this is a requirement of Kesdjan is to
do that, is to blend those two laws together.

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Participant: Would you see a relationship of the blending of these two laws and the
Morning Preparation that was given from Mr. Adie?
Keith: Yes. Good example. Yes, we make that effort. Then finally, the final two of Bennett’s
six laws is the triad of great law when something is law everything must obey the law; there
is no such thing as not obeying the law; you can’t make up your own law. The law is the law.
When you come under that it is something very rigid and specific. There is a law for this,
that is the law under that world.
And to oppose that, the sixth is the law of Grace. Where in spite of the law and in direct
contrast to the law is freedom from the law. How can we blend these two?
Participant: I have a question here because when you were saying that the octave is an in-
volutionary octave and yet this noticing by endlessness is when something came in and the
octave went up, that sounds to me like it is not following the path of the law, that when some-
thing new comes in like that and it changes the direction, would that be an example of grace?
Keith: Has to be. Has to be but that would not be Grace as we have been talking about it,
it is something that would be identifiable in our experience.
Participant: When you change that direction and you all of a sudden have this automatic
but free ability to move whether it’s away from an enemy or towards a sustainable source
of food, which is also part of the movement. In that movement, you come across different
experiences and that’s going to build different neural pathways because even the most
primitive thing is able to take in some impression of some sort. The idea to move, whether
you are moving away from an enemy or towards food, you have created the ability of the
brain to hunt to hunt in a certain way. You have almost created a primitive brain that taken
its experience­– you can do that with little worms, you can shock them and cut them in half.
Even in those experiences you are creating an evolutionary octave towards developing the
brains.
Keith: Ok, fine. But here we have, for good or ill, these are conscious events that we have
to understand, we have to participate in that have everything is to do with the forming of
Kesdjan. We are really talking about a contradiction. Contradiction is implicit when we
talk about the world of self-other. This is the contradiction.
I spoke about the contradiction between Creation and Interaction, or Identity and
Transformation or Order or Freedom or Grace, but at the same time, when we talk about
self-other, this is a great contradiction. This is: this is me and that’s you. How are we one?
That is the question ultimately of relationship, of Kesdjan.
Participant: In that story, as soon as something begins to move and it goes on a hunt, it
has to eat other things. It’s not like the plant that can live off the sun. We now eat or are
eaten. So the dependency really becomes and it is an important piece of the puzzle is the
capacity to transform through digestion, the capacity to digest, to take the outside world
into oneself to make it part of you is really important process.
In science that whole picture of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, we recapitulate the
story of the phylum or the individual. It seems like there is that story at a very physical level
and a manifestation of it in World 48, just what we are talking about here but it is not the
outside world, it is the inside world.
Keith: It’s speaking out the la-sol-fa but not taking it further but not considering there
is now a fa-sol-la-si-do. It’s just doesn’t consider that possibility at all.

111
 fa
Surplanetary

l
na
tio
Tetartoc osmoses

olu
la fa

inv
One-celled life sol One-brained
si sol
do Two-brained

l
na
la Three-brained

tio
The Lateral Octave si

olu
(do si la sol fa — fa sol la si do) do Kesdjan Body

ev
Higher-being Body

8 1

1B
1B 1B
2B 2B
3B 3B

World 48 Octavic Representation

Enneagramma of all life-forms are basically the
7 2
same but the inner circulation differs as shown.

One-brained (1B)

Two-brained (2B)
(inner circulation
not shown)
Three-brained (3B)
5 4

Second
Conscious Sacred
Shock Ischmetch Real I
Sacred
MI 12 FA 6 Degindad

The potential evolutionary

motion of a three-brained being

RE 24 SOL 6
Sacred
Ternoonald

DO48
First
Conscious
Shock
S I6 LA 6
Sacred Sacred
Anklad Podkoolad

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Participant: Can we try to tie together the two symbols we have been discussing? As we
follow around the evolution and the Symbol to Kesdjan and we see that it’s left the mass-
based world and there is some possibility of return can we go back to the enneagram and
talk about the degrees of Reason and the conditions there with the Higher Being-body and
what kind of insights can you get from the Symbol about the return from the point of view
of the enneagram and the higher degrees of Reason?
Keith: The first thing I would like to point out is that the representation of the Symbol
form, in its complete form, is an enneagram. When you look at it, you may say, “That doesn’t
look like an enneagram to me.” That’s true but I’ve drawn three circles just to illustrate the
principle that around each world of law. On the illustration is only one of the six Lateral
Octaves. This is frequently confusing. If you look at this for too long, you begin to ask
questions about it that re unrealistic because it is all six of them that have to be taken into
consideration.
Why? Because they represent re–mi–fa–sol–la–si of a much larger octave. There is
an enneagram there of, for instance, Microcosmos. You can draw a big circle around the
outer apex of all of the Microcosmos triads and then you can do one around Tetartocos-
mos and then you can draw it around one-brained beings and two-brained beings and
three-brained beings. They are all enneagrams. Why? Because they take in all six steps
and they have a do in each octave so they are truly expressions of an enneagram built on
the enneagram.
It’s very interesting to what degree I tried to go into it individually. It becomes very
interesting but enormously complicated because you suddenly get all of these concentric
enneagramma and then the question comes up, what does one have to do with another so
if you looked at the enneagram of one-brained beings, does that have a relationship to the
enneagram of three-brained beings. I am sure it does but when you begin to look at some
of the relationships that are implicit in the diagrammatic representation. I think it can
become very confusing.
Participant: Can we see perceive the degrees of Reason from the enneagram here
[I guess John A is indicating an illustration of an traditional enneagram] in the Symbol?
Keith: Degrees of Reason only in reference to brain-ness; is that what you are talking
about? So there is the enneagram on one-brained life, two-brained life…
Participant: I am more concerned with this area of la6. We spend some time going over
this and talking about degrees of Reason and we are talking about the Symbol and getting
from evolution of Kesdjan which on the Symbol leaves the mass-based world and is involv-
ing the Higher Emotional and Higher Intellectual particularly in degrees of Reason and
now there is a concern how does that return. Can you talk about the return on the Symbol
and how does endlessness get his information and what are the possibilities there?
Keith: I have no idea. That is obviously the reason why I don’t, except in one representa-
tion where I put in the degrees of Reason (Degindad, Ternoonald, Podkoolad, Anklad). By
no means did I ever want to imply that there was any way of taking that placement and
making sense of it in terms of the rest of the enneagram that is talked about there. I would
see no way of relating them.
Participant: In the exercise this morning, we started out with the rotation of the limbs
with the eyes opened and moved through that for 5 minutes, and then Mr. Adie said

113
something about you are sitting in the room with people and you are seeing these people
but at home you’ll be seeing the objects of your house and they will have their placement
there. Then we had our eyes closed and still did the rotation of the limbs and when we
came back the last 5 minutes, I opened my eyes and we were encouraged to look around,
I had a very strong experience of seeing everyone in the room as their own cosmos, the cen-
ter of their own world, their own experience, their own impressions and there was some-
thing in the way that we touch, when you say that we come into contact and we talk and
we interact that I am not sure that there isn’t something new that is created in a certain
way. There is an I-Thou, I-You interaction that there is not something that we take away of
one another’s energies or bits of the cosmos. It has some sort of ability for us to have new
material to create something new, at least for us on a personal level, maybe not in the world.
But it was a very strong image of seeing and it was absolutely different from seeing people
almost like objects to seeing this integrity of energy around each individual in those two
juxtaposed experiences.
Keith: Thank you.
Participant: For myself, it was the first time I found a way to resolve the paradox between
order of Law and Freedom and Grace. It is the law that there are two places where other
levels contact each other. It is the law that is possible to move under fewer laws, which then
feels like a miracle. When Gurdjieff said the miracle was a higher world entering this world,
I didn’t get that until now but that is a law. There are laws that allow for the movement up,
laws that allow for the movement down, so it’s a huge mystery.
Keith: If it didn’t then everything would collapse into it and we would be ruled by a rigid
lawfulness that would not permit any other possibility.
Participant: Then you would be in the Negative Absolute.
Keith: Right. There are so many interesting questions to be explored about that – about
the evolutional/involutional Universes. One that I find very interesting is trying to put
endlessness into the creation of mass.
If mass appears very early in our Cosmos, it is one thing for me with my simple mind if
I think about higher worlds, I think about energy and solar things and higher energies but
I don’t think about crass matter having anything really of a higher order. This way of look-
ing at the requirement–a sacrifice – is to entrap one’s infinite energy for creativity and not
be able to escape its serving a purpose forever and ever.
Remember when I said that the proton, by every calculation in mathematical principles
and quantum mechanics, lives longer than the Universe does. By implication, the proton
simply is always there, always present; it is a constancy that underpins the whole of the
Megalocosmos. What a sacrifice to create that–to be that–from the very beginning as a
requirement. Without the proton and the neutron and electron there can be no Megalo-
cosmos. All the energy you want it just all the energy you want; it is just going to go on,
energy, energy, energy. Nothing will ever take form, nothing.
In order for there to be formed things, you need mass and you need the mass from very
early on. When Gurdjieff talks about the particles that come together, the “early materiali-
ties,” I think it the term that he uses, early materialities that come together by gravity and
form a sun. He speaks about this as the second stage in the creation of the Universe. He’s
got it right there­–the absolute need, the requirement for materiality as a substrate for suns.

114
Suns are not just energy; they are not just a bunch of photons that decide to get together.
They are a product of some relationship and that relationship is of masses.
In the instance of virgin suns, it is the relationship, essentially of all protons and the
whole of the atomic table begins to emerge from the functional action of the sun itself. It
begins more and more heavier nuclei and then, as that begins to appear, all the interactions
between those begin to appear.
So we have the substrate for all that is going to happen when they become separated
off into the planetary world where the energy levels are such that now they can be more
enduring, they can remain for hundreds of thousands of millions of years in that state.
Whereas, on the sun there is too much energy, there is too much going on, too much
creating of the elementalness for anything to coalesce. So we have this interesting beginning/
ending that requires the mass but can’t do anything without the energy, which can’t do any-
thing without the mass. So the mass must be there from very early on. What can the source
of the mass be if it is not endlessness?
Participant: There is the prayer: “Holy God, Holy Firm, Holy Immortal…”1 and that’s like
the representative of World Three. So in World Three there is the prayer “Holy God, Holy
Firm, Holy Immortal…” so it is like the Holy Firm is present in World Three, right at the
very beginning. From World One to World Three you’ve got Holy Firm in World Three.
Keith: Right.
Participant: Is that an actuality or are we talking about in potential?
Keith: We are trying to solve the problem of where mass came from.
Participant: Right, because as you said when you were talking about the periodic
table having the elements that come from the sun, it seems to me that is time, as the
condensations form in the lower worlds.
Keith: Only on the basis of mass, though, if the proton were not there, there would be no
suns. We need both. In whatever conception we come up with, we need mass and we need
it early and if you think about what is the origin of that mass to be there that early, you have
lay it at the door of endlessness. We don’t have any choice; it doesn’t appear out of no-
where. It is certainly not inert, not from what nuclear physics is now discovering that there
are 90 some elements they have identified so far that have something to do with the actions
of atoms.
In our world, that’s not true. In our world, we don’t have gluons and quarks running
around, they are confined and I find that term, even though it came from the world of phy-
sics, is a very revealing one. This is the confinement what is considered to be high gamma
or something higher (if there is such a thing as anything higher than gamma waves in terms
of their energy). The substance of a proton, in terms of the quarks and gluons where the
quarks are the mass and gluons are what glues it together, that’s why they are called “gluons.”
These words are very funny. Do you know where the word “quark” came from? It’s from
a line in James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” He picked the
word out and plunked it in there so now we are stuck with quarks and gluons. What are
gluons? They are glue, that’s all; they hold things together; that’s what glue does. So scien-
tific language in this arena is not very sophisticated; it can be pretty bizarre.
1 G.I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales, p 752.

115
Participant: I have a comment about mass and energy, that these ideas have been intuited
and known for long periods of time in the ancient Chinese and Ayurveda and all of that, the
ying and the yang, the heavy and the ephemeral, the masculine and the feminine, there was
the one that divided into the two, mass and energy and from that came the ten thousand
things. So these ideas were in the consciousness for very long time that are now getting,
through physics, into a very discrete sort of science but they have been the basis of cultures
medicine and philosophy for many, many people.
Keith: The Chinese have it going back at least 12,000 years, there is evidence of a com-
pendia of how the world was made and its meaning and so forth and so many different
directions have been explored by the different traditions. One thing about that Gurdjieff
has to say was all of these great beings who came to the Earth who were the originators
of the great faiths and religions, they are all the same. Literally, I am saying we have all
the same Being.
What they bring and the form they give to it, it is the their best judgment, appropriate
for the age of man and the kind of civilization that they appeared inside of and so forth.
I find that a charming way of seeing this in part because so much of what Gurdjieff spoke
about at the turn of the century by inference and often every directly, especially about our
three-brained-ness – you can imagine Paul MacLean who was this eminent investigator,
scientist, head of brain research at NIH for years and he wrote this book The Triune Brain
in Evolution and published it in the 1980s which was a compendium of the three to four
hundred papers that he had published in various scientific journal in his early days of in-
vestigation in 1960. I wrote to Dr. MacLean and I complemented him and thanked him
for the immense effort that had gone into producing the book but I said you are about 60
years too late because somebody has already spoken about the triune brain of man and
spoken of it in remarkably similar context to what you have investigated. So I gave him the
reference to Gurdjieff and a little bit of historical reference. He found that so interesting
and when Mandy and I went down to visit him he had his own comments–not much, I
found it interesting; I put it down to his age because he lived another 3 or 4 years but he
was elderly and taking care of his wife who had a stroke. He was a very kind, a typical
United States civil servant, always kinds, always listening, never abrasive, always absorbing
whatever was going on without committing himself. About Gurdjieff he said, “it was inter-
esting about what Gurdjieff said the three brains; it never went much of anywhere did it?”
[laughter] It depends–if you are running NIH, no, it didn’t.
Participant: You were talking about energy and mass. Everyone knows Einstein’s
equation E=MC2 so if energy is Affirming, mass is Denying can life be considered the
Reconciling Force?
Keith: It has to be because it is both a particle it has mass that is the whole underpinning
of quantum mechanics is the simultaneous quixotic nature. We drive ourselves crazy trying
to think about that. How do you think about a particle and a wave at the same time?
Participant: So that equation is like the Law of Three, in that sense.
Keith: In that sense, yes.
Participant: Affirming, Denying, Reconciling.

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Participant: So, somehow it seems that Beelzebub represents Reason and Understanding
and somehow connected to Will and the stories of his descents one could read as example
of how Reason develops or appears at different critical experiences in the life of humanity
and gives a characterization of that and then the story culminates with his return. Then that
would seem in some way to indicate a filling out or a completion of a possibility in Reason
that leaves open the question of Hassein reentering somehow that prior process at a different
point with that experience of his Grandfather but also with the experience on Earth, so to
speak, of all of that Reason which has developed.
In a sense, when I try to work into quantum concepts, it is almost as if you almost reach
the place where ordinary logic and rationality fail you and so there is some other quality of
simultaneity that needs to be there.
It struck me earlier that it seems as though that the setting up of the story would lead
you to believe that Hassein somehow has to return but at a different place for, perhaps, a
different purpose not with the same obligation and purposes that Beelzebub had in that
myth. I see that as the equivalent of the last chapter in Meetings with Remarkable Men.
Skridlov has disappeared now and the past has culminated itself and it ends in this recog-
nition that, no matter what you have learned somehow, you just can’t convey that to your
neighbor; you can’t just explain it to them on a rational basis because it is impossible. That
is the theme of Father Giovanni’s statement to Skridlov. But then there is this question
that seems to be everyone’s question these days: what now? Where do we go now? What
should I be doing now or what should the Work be doing?
Participant: Are you making that an analogy with the quantum where it breaks down?
Participant: Yes, an analogy in terms of what is possible to use in terms of rationality. It
seems like there is a large amount of irrational perspectives that people have that just by,
what we would consider rationality and so one of the dilemmas seem to be how, despite
all of our knowledge and the depth of that and the amazingness of it, how can there be
such irrationality in terms of what people hold as beliefs and views that remain unable to
be altered as a result of this modern process of rational exploration of the world that is
profound. It seems as though there is some kind of limit to that that requires some other
way of being because you can’t, apparently, and that is why I mentioned Father Giovanni
if you are in your beliefs my rational explanation to you of why those beliefs don’t stand
up is not going to move anything in you.
Keith: Aren’t you sitting like Beelzebub did in the Chiahana looking at the neighbor
drinking his beer saying, “I sure have been here before, five thousand years ago, I sat in
the same kind of Chiahana and this guy was just as blind then as he still is now. Isn’t that
the same question?
Participant: I am not sure that it is the same question.
Keith: Can you climb into that other guy’s head and shake him up and make him see
differently?
Participant: I don’t think you can with rationality but I don’t think that that was Beelzebub’s
role. I think it was the rationality that was at the base of his what little emotional expres-
sion his characterization is given with is not much. It is based in this injustice of the irratio-
nality of it. I have a question about Hassein seems to be an entry of an emotional something

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into the dynamic of the picture that has come after Beelzebub this time through this entire
evolution or history with only himself and Ahoon. What does that mean in terms of using that
imagery as a myth that speaks to us.
Keith: I still don’t have your question clearly in mind because if anything is fundamental to
Work it seems to me we could put it great letters over the door: Do not proselytize. Don’t
try to convince anybody of anything. That’s not in the cards; it’s playing the wrong deck,
the wrong game. So we are left with other devices, that is for sure. We have all had that life
experience. How many people have you interacted with that you had the wish to interest
them or to share something about this Work? Many, many people. Where are they now?
What happened? It’s pretty rare. I’m not saying this in any positive sense but we are pretty
rare when you think of all the context we have had, all the possibilities, all the interests
that have been explored and, yet, here you are. Why? When Bennett speaks about a small
minority, he is speaking about a small minority; he’s not exaggerating at all. We cannot
anticipate that there are going to be a great many people or that there is some tidal shift
that is going to take place. It’s not possible.
Participant: I had an experience the other day. I was performing a magic show about
anti-bullying and using the Golden Rule to have harmonious relationships with each other
for a large group in Salt Lake and a native American gal came up to me after the show. She’s
about 10 years old a little bit thicker than her peers, not fat but a little heavy. Her looks may
have gotten her teased. She said, “People tease me and I’ve been bullied and it’s been hard
but I’ve gotten over it, mostly. It still happens some.”
Normally at the end of these shows, at least ten children come up and stand around in
a semi-circle. They all talk at once and I have to be careful to try to be appreciative of each
comment as best I can and say something to everyone and maybe try to focus on one. But
in this case, her story was of interest to everyone who came up. They didn’t know this would
happen, they just stopped and listened to her and I listened to her. She talked unusually long;
these things normally last no more than a minute and this lasted 5 minutes where she talked
and I was listening. Occasionally I would say something but mostly I was hearing a long story
of how she had overcome the bullying that had happened to her. Her parents were worried
about her eye and kids would tease her about her eye because it wandered and they thought
she might die, she said, from this wandering eye. She even got into sex, not like abuse but
just about how she knows she is going to be pure when she gets older and resist, almost like
she had been slightly indoctrinated about being a virgin when she gets married, I don’t know.
She got very far along in her story even on that kind of level.
During this, I recognized that this was an unusual talk; normally it’s about how the tricks
were done or a few things here and there that were funny or autographs. This was very deep.
I realized my role was to give through listening and that her story being heard was the power-
ful thing that was going on. Even the kids around were doing that.
I thought later that this Kesdjan world, that we can live in where we have energy and we
have choice with our energy and we have being and we have choice on how we are going
to be, is aimed at giving. When you spoke earlier about matching the opposing laws com-
plementary opposite laws of: Order and Freedom, and Identity and Transformation, and
Creation and Interaction. The being and becoming are part of what I am doing–seeing that
she is a certain way and she’s becoming another way. For me to be able to hold that for my
own seeing, if I can see her as both at once, rather one or the other, it somehow helps.

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 So that experience, which I told a few people about, keeps informing me. Even now
when you were talking about blending the two tri ads, I didn’t see that until now. I think
I was doing that when I was listening to her, to some extent, I was doing that.
Keith: We could take a single event, precisely parallel to what you are speaking about,
and just talk out how somebody creates something which begins an interaction, a conver-
sation about this and we persist in our conversation to the point where I finally come to
the conclusion that you are a jack-ass and what you put forward here wasn’t very revealing
anyhow. In this process I am obviously establishing my identity, that I am the smart one
in this conversation and you don’t know what you are talking about so I have identity and
suddenly something in me wakes up. You suddenly that this girl is struggling and some-
thing has to be transformed. Something has to change so then I go to work on that. What
in me is to be changed from this arrogant identity that I fell into. How can I change that?
So I see that my recourse is that I have to know the law. I have to know how to change
myself. I have to give up something in order and I have to find an enzyme that will help
in that transformation and so on.
So I am looking into discovering the Law and in that–when I discover that–I find
freedom. In this way of just talking out a single event, we have gone through all six. I
think life is like that. I finally came to the conclusion that it isn’t working on one or the
other, that’s not the issue. The issue is how do we see these all flow together and how
we have to be an active participant, giving and receiving, giving and receiving taking on
responsibility for the feelings that we produce, doing the intentional suffering and then
doing the conscious labor.
Focusing on anyone of these laws is not really the important thing. The important
thing is to see the motion, the enneagramatic motion through the whole sequence.
Then we have moments. I think when this has happened, as it happened this week-
end, we have had many moments, at least I have, been an observer of many moments
in people where you really see their Kesdjanian arising. You see the effort, you see the
patience, sometimes you see the retreat and then the coming back into it. We see this
with each other and we can endorse it and help it. So this itself becomes an exploration
of the whole Six Lawfulnesses that we must work through and with.

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