In this article, we will briefly examine the use of the word Laws in the Gurdjieff Work and general views Gurdjieff had regarding laws.  The idea of laws creates foundational concepts for understanding the structure of Gurdjieff’s movements and writings, since the oddities found in his works are specifically placed to indicate the presence of laws.  Intentionally violating a law as a means of education was a central principle which he called “Intentional Inexactitudes” (see the speech of Aksharpanziar in the chapter Art).  Because the word has meanings in other contexts it is important to isolate the particular way in which Gurdjieff used the word since he used it uniquely.

To today’s reader, Gurdjieff’s use of the word “Law” may sound rather archaic.  The idea of law comes from jurisprudence.  Before church and state were separated, there was a correlation drawn in many societies between the rulership with the laws that rulership imposed on its people and God as a kind of king of the Universe, creating the Universe and bringing it into a coherent order.  It wasn’t, in fact, a correlation, but a fusion.  Kings were divinely ordained, therefore any Law passed by the ruler for their society came directly from God.  So Law, as a concept arising from societal rules and regulations, developed an association with Universal Order and a sense of divinity from an early time.

With the advent of scientific thinking in Europe, then, the discovery of patterns or rules within math and nature received the same designation, theorems being called “Laws.”  In this way, law, originally a concept of societal rules, attached itself to Objective patterns discovered by scientists, and snuck its way into the scientific nomenclature.

Since that time, the divide between science, state, and religion has widened in Western societies.  While still relatable, these three areas conceived by modern culture exist quite separately in peoples minds.

While science still makes use of many Laws, in the form of useful hypotheses and theorems, the development in mathematics, of quantum physics and probability mathematics has drastically changed our concept of Universal Order.  Small particles, when analyzed closely, appear as probability fields rather than fixed objects.  Many societal systems, as for instance insurance corporations, operate through statistical probability rather than immutable laws.  The advent of mathematical frameworks which effectively incorporate uncertainty has changed the scientific game a great deal from the 1930’s and on.  Modern distrust of the state, suspicion towards arbitrary social stigmas imposed by religions, and a general culture of individual entitlement make use of a word like “Law” sound rather archaic and perhaps suspect.  For all these reasons and others, the word Law has an utterly different ring to the modern ear.

Gurdjieff was writing in the 1920’s and on, and appears to have made little effort to keep up with the science of his day, nor could he have fully anticipated future developments.  What is rather fascinating in Gurdjieff’s case is his simultaneous assertion in the existence of Laws and at the same time the implication of their non-reality by his idea that one could free oneself from them.  He proposed a cosmology of levels in which varying degrees of law applied.  I feel this to be an important distinction when thinking about Gurdjieff’s body of work in the context of the 21st century as it distinguishes Gurdjieff’s rather fluid concept of Law from more fixed, hierarchical versions also present at the time.  Many of Gurdjieff’s Tales appear tailored to upset a sense of traditional hierarchy and values.

When we examine Gurdjieff’s presentation of the Laws in Beelzebub’s Tales, we find a complex description of the Laws of the Three and Seven.  We are left on the one hand feeling that Gurdjieff means something with this, but on the other hand cannot truly resolve why “three” and “seven”?  Why not four, five, or six?  Thirteen?

A unique perspective is that the Laws are meant to be rejected at the literal level.  That is, the Laws, like pretty much everything else in the book, are a pseudo science (what Gurdjieff at one period called Moonshine).  However, like everything else in his system, they are pointing to a deeper truth if only the reader can surpass their own suggestibility or laziness of thought.

It takes painstaking consideration to unwind the knot Gurdjieff has woven.  Why would he lie?  Why spend so much time, invest so much energy and thought, into veiling the truth?  Gurdjieff spent many years on his book.  Many readers choose to simply pass over the difficult or unworkable parts, keeping the things that can be made sense of.

The idea I have presented, which I believe is unique, is that he was, outwardly, and down to the detail, a conscious charlatan.

One area of Beelzebub’s Tales I believe is particularly useful for understanding this is the conversation Beelzebub has with a chemist in his Sixth Sojourn.  They are discussing “powders” produced by a pharmacist.  The pharmacist admits the lack of any key ingredient in any of his products, explaining, in essence, that it doesn’t matter, as it will work if people believe it will, and that, in any case, there is no way for him to be caught.  He confesses that he has long experience of producing false products of this kind.

It becomes quite clear that the pharmacist is a mouthpiece for Gurdjieff, and the fake medicines he produces are all of the occult ideas Gurdjieff constructed.  Gurdjieff never stopped creating new and novel ideas, and the ease with which he left them shows he did not actually take them seriously.  Rather, he was concerned with testing them on his students to understand the human psyche.  It is striking that none of the ideas, and in the present case, the “Laws” can be verified directly using science.  Rather, one must allude to various circumstantial “evidence”.  Even so, parallel laws could be created using the numbers “five”, “ten”, or “fifty” and interesting corroborative mathematical patterns or “evidence” could be found to support them.

Stepping back from this situation, it is interesting the degree to which our psychology becomes enamored and trapped by interesting and high sounding ideas.  To be sure, Gurdjieff’s occult system is now dated, and is not well known.  Even though there are groups all over the world, the number of people in Gurdjieff groups surely numbers in the thousands, perhaps even ten thousand.  However, this is the number of people willing to engage in a teaching which contains these ideas.  In most cases, people simply wonder at them, but don’t take them especially seriously, instead focusing on the practical aspects of the teaching.  Nonetheless, the specter of Gurdjieff’s crazy ideas, no matter how much it is ignored, sits there, just out of sight, taunting those identified with “the Work”, demeaning its respectability to outsiders.  After all, a search of Gurdjieff’s name will immediately bring up Beelzebub, and one can hardly get through a page of the book without finding complete “nonsense.”

My point here is that the truth contained in Gurdjieff’s idea of laws refers not to objective scientific laws but to ideas people hold which constrain their view of life.  Belief systems in general constrict a person’s perceptual bandwidth, focusing on certain aspects of reality at the expense of others.  Although this is perhaps not a bad thing in general, and its questionable whether we as human beings are able to form a direct picture of reality at all, the lack of flexibility that comes with a fixed set of beliefs is extremely limiting.  The more fixed one’s ideas and assumptions are, the more bound one is.

One of the core criticisms Gurdjieff levels at humans is their suggestibility.  He says this is in a book containing the above mentioned pseudoscience of Universal Laws.  He even makes the names of the Laws completely clownish to poke fun at them.  Nonetheless, because they are so complicated and explained with a tone of seriousness, the reader receives the implication that they cannot be easily thrown out either.  As a result, the reader is caught: what to do with these Laws?  Ignore them?  Simply wonder at them from time to time and then move on?  Throw them out?

I am suggesting that the literal presentation of Gurdjieff’s Laws represent a very low world.  That is, one is under the most laws by believing in the Laws!  The most literal, fixed view is the one that is most constrained, the least flexible.  When one considers that the laws are not literal, but point to something else, one has now been released from a “lower world”, and has another degree of freedom.  The degree of freedom they now have is an ability to consider the Laws as metaphors, symbols, or analogies that express a principle.  This principle then has the characteristic of applying more flexibly to psychology, philosophy, mysticism, etc.  Further, the description of the Laws can now be viewed, rather than as “out there”, as a description of the very process the reader went through to overcome a literal understanding.

In a sense, the laws describe the perceptual process the reader goes through to overcome the laws!  This is what Gurdjieff called Objective Art, where the effort and the knowledge correspond to produce understanding.  Gurdjieff forces the reader to some degree to accept and then reject the laws in order to find out what they mean.  When the reader examines them, they describe the structured experience the reader has just gone through.  Although it would make this article far too long, it is possible to describe in detail how certain metaphors are constructed in Beelzebub.  By metaphors I mean, the process of contemplating what a given Object means is a foreseen process on the part of the author.  There is certain information available depending on how much study the reader has done and what connections they have formed in the material.

This controlled release of information, the “Form and Sequence”, takes place exactly according to Gurdjieff’s description of the Laws.  However, readers will never be able to make head or tails of the description of the Laws until they have gone through the process of discernment with regard to a number of the stories.  In a sense, the reader, having figured out several of the allegories meaning, begins to intuit a pattern to the process.  This pattern, then, turns out to be the Laws!

It is interesting that Gurdjieff’s Laws are false and true at the same time.  A lower level of the laws is a literal belief in those laws!  An understanding of the laws as describing psychological processes of perception represents fewer laws, because one now understands perception and how it affects one’s freedom to act in the world.  There are yet deeper, more profound, and mystical aspects to the laws that transcend psychology.  Even in this case, however, only alluded to here, the laws are surely not literal!

So in G’s system, the laws themselves are a trap into which the reader naturally falls, which give them the very tools needed to escape them.  They give the reader a chance to understand perception and how limiting our beliefs and views can be.  We can go our whole lives, believing in our stories about ourselves or people we know and never divine that an inner process of perception is at play.  Gurdjieff’s laws express a profound knowledge and experience of this commonplace fact and the possibility of freedom from it at a level deeper than is generally known.

Gurdjieff told Ouspenky he could get a lot out of reading if he only knew how to read.  He also told him that if he understood all he had written in his books Gurdjieff would come and bow down before him.

That Gurdjieff would say this indicates that he perceived a great deal of knowledge in books of the kind Ouspensky had written, but that nevertheless the manner in which they expressed knowledge meant that they could be read without understanding, that is, without depth of being.  Ouspensky, responding to Gurdjieff’s ideas about this, notes the difference in the way one encounters an idea at different times in life, assigning the cause of the difference to a change in being.

Gurdjieff also pointed out to Ouspensky that reality, in all its levels, is ever present.  He used the analogy of a vessel containing a quantity of mixed substances of varying densities.  We can find a connection between this analogy and the nature of knowledge, since Gurdjieff also referred to knowledge as material.  For him, knowledge was a quantity not distributed evenly or, according to our notions, justly.  Here I believe he is referring not to knowledge in the way we typically think about it but to deep forms of perception by which we contact and sense reality.  To the degree one had the experience of a growth of being, this experience would inform one’s understanding of everything.  Truths, rather than becoming false, acquire new dimensions of significance in a way difficult to describe.

Returning to the analogy of a vessel containing a mixture of substances, Gurdjieff pointed out that a great deal of knowledge is released during turbulent times (mass psychosis) and therefore available for those who know how to assimilate it.  We can infer that one must have the ability to separate out bits of knowledge from the general mass which have been mixed in with knowledge or understanding of a lower nature. This ability to discern and assign importance to different aspects of impressions depends on emotional understanding and the level of one’s being.

All of the above applies quite neatly to Beelzebub.  Beelzebub is itself a kind of vessel, a container whose boundaries are demarcated by its length (number of pages) and content (words used).  What the reader finds is a highly “mixed bag”, that is, passages filled with a wide variety of qualities in the form of thoughts, feelings, and sensed relationships. There is great knowledge, but it has been buried. It is not available to all equally, but only to those who are willing to dig.  Many conditions determine whether one will dig, and dig in the right place.  There are individual subjective qualities relating to intelligence, discernment, life experience, and being, as well as accidental circumstances such as family life and career which limit the time one can invest in studying the book.  Whether the outer accidental conditions of one’s life or innate individual qualities, the knowledge in the book is available to the reader in precisely the same manner ordinary circumstances contain wisdom for the taking.  The vital ingredient is one’s own intent to look deeply into the flow of life as it comes and before it goes.

Beelzebub’s coarsest “substances” consist primarily of the literal storyline.  Here the material is highly polarizing, representing the level of acceptance and rejection. Stories are variously funny, disgusting, vague, boringly specific, or abstract. If the reader persists past this level they will notice many indications left by the author which, while obvious enough, do not culminate in any kind of immediate understanding or even clear direction.  If the reader persists yet further, thinking through the logical implications of these indicators, he or she will eventually notice that Gurdjieff’s word use evokes multiple, shifting perspectives.  Managing to articulate this multiple views, exercising subtle levels of discernment, the reader, as an unintended by product of their contemplation, arrives at a deep sensation of their own mind’s shifting representations in ordinary life, perhaps even realizing the utter inability of the mind to see anything whatsoever.  One’s life is a “confabulation”, a “creation”.  This level of the book coincides also with a collapsing of the book’s metaphor’s  back onto each other: strings of events, when interpreted fully in light of Gurdjieff’s indications, initially appearing as a linear sequence one after the other, come to represent aspects or perspectives of one single event.  Conversely, one single event comes to respresent a string of separate events.  Metaphors act as mini-Sun Absolutes, forming dynamics points of concentration from which many meanings emanate but also into which meaning returns. Individual characters become the many faces of one character.  The book itself becomes an elucidatory apparatus, a means, for the reader to see the place within themselves from which all mental perceptions arise. In forming the allegory within themselves, they recapitulate the metaphor’s unity within multiplicity in their own being.  In Japan they say that the flower arrange, in arranging the flowers, arranges their own mind.  This expresses the relationship between the reader and the book perfectly.  That is, each passage in the book contains the Ray (Theomertmalogos) which expresses all levels, from the murky ignorance of the reader’s first read to the experience of a dynamic unity within multiplicity, everything unfolding as a separate newness before folding back into the One at the center.

Moving back to Gurdjieff’s reference to the ability to read, we make a few comments about Beelzebub’s structure.  First, it is structured to require the type of attention that could be used when reading other books but is not required.  For example, the reader’s ability to understand a given statement in Beelzebub, whether its a part of a sentence or a full sentence, is completely contingent on their ability to connect it with what was read before as well as holding any incomplete thoughts until future passages.  One simply must use this capacity to understand the book.  It gives absolutely nothing of real value to the reader who does not exercise their attention in this way.

This is different from other texts,  in that complete statements are often made which are logically cohesive in and of themselves without reference to prior or future passages.  Of course, the author, to the degree of their own understanding, will have written a series of related ideas and ordered the exposition in such as way as for them to logically related to each other.  However, one may notice that one can read any separate part of these kinds of books and come away with a sense of understanding.  This is entirely not the case with Beelzebub.  One may think one has understood a sentence.  However, if one arrests one’s attention on even one word which has been bracketed in quotation marks, (which words appear in nearly ever sentence) or any of the other peculiar textual indications Gurdjieff uses, it will quickly become clear one has no idea what Gurdjieff means with that indication.  Further, one will immediately feel that they have nothing at their disposal in the passage to resolve Gurdjieff’s meaning.

Since Gurdjieff’s death this has often been thought to be a result of the fact that it is meant for one’s “unconscious mind”, which is assimilating it at some deeper level, rather than an indication that one has more work to do or needs to increase one’s consciousness of the book in some way.

There are other examples, but looking at the structure of Beelzebub’s exposition, the staggered order of information given to the reader, reveals a deep intentionality by the author.  Gurdjieff was requesting that the reader hold the various sections together, pulling the correct bits and pieces from various passages across the book in response to the riddles posed in any given statement under consideration.  This requires discernment and the ability to cut through various kinds of misinformation he intentionally left.