Red herrings in the Tales are intended to delay a premature conclusion about a many-sided idea. The final thought which is to be conveyed has been broken into its constituent pieces much like in a mystery novel. Each piece is embedded in an adjacent, related line of thought. These secondary lines are themselves configured in such a way as to be mutually depenant, or mutually completing. Thus, the pieces of the primary idea are connected only by means of holding relevant context. The process ensures that when things “click”, the idea is perceived accurately, with consciousness of unspoken background. The deployment of ideas in this way ensures a proper perception in the final analysis.

The typical idea has been that the barrier to understand things in the Tales is meant for it to bypass the “formatory apparatus” and go directly into the subconscious, where Conscience is ostensibly buried. This is nothing other than fancy, pretzel-twisting justification of ignorance. In reality, Gurdjieff harped on the mathematical exactitude of ideas in Objective Art. They were so exact, ordinary language couldn’t hold them. As a result, he invented an exact language which could organize thought in a new way.

The idea of the Tales and the unconscious manner of imbibing is the result of a collective dreaming process which unconsciously patches together partial ideas from Gurdjieff’s writings, Ouspensky’s version of the Work, Joseph Campbell, and others. Gurdjieff made statements about the unconscious in his Preface, included a short passage about bards and myths in Meetings with Remarkable Men, and thats about it. Ouspenky recorded him as saying more about the use of myth to convey Symbols to the Higher Intellectual.

The first problem is that Ouspensky hadn’t fully understood Gurdjieff, but simply tried to record what he had said. He inadvertently imparted a form of abstraction, and high sounding intellectualism. This is not to say Gurdjieff was not abstract, high-sounding, or intellectual himself. However, it can be seen when reviewing Ouspenkies works although he grasped the concepts Gurdjieff gave he had not actually seen it in practice. This more than anything imparts a removed flavor to his verision, even though it is relatively accurate. In fact, it is amazing Ouspenky grasped as much as he did in the few years he worked with Gurdjieff. In the end, it is significant that Ouspensky never read Beelzebub’s Tales, which demonstrates everything he taught in his early groups in Russia to Ouspensky and others. Therefore Ouspensky forms a very important and useful record, but contains unuseful connotations. This is proven by the fact Gurdjieffians in general view the Higher Centers, Myth, Unity and Multiplicity, as so far away that these never enter into their personal Work.

The abstract idea that myths trasnmit knowledge to higher centers is something Gurdjieffians found very interesting. So interesting, in fact, they joined Gurdjieff groups. However, there was always a tension between the emphasis on the practical and the theoretical. Groupd leaders could too easily be embarrased if asked directly if they had a “higher being body”. A kind of war of attrition between the ideas of the work and the emphasis on practicality gradually led to the setting aside of the more rarified ideas associated with profound states of Awakening. Awakening came to be more of a kind of psychological awakening to one’s inadequacies, over-reactions, or partial shift of state during retreats. But the tension has always remained there, and Gurdjieff’s text, as well as others like that of Ouspensky, hover above the Work like spectres, an embarrasment when explaining the Work to people of other traditions or simply outside the Work.

The result of this kind of tension was a tendency to seize on anything that might justify these absurd beliefs. As implied in this article, these beliefs are not actually quite so absurd when one actually seems them in practice in Gurdjieff’s written exercises. However, when Joseph Campbell started to turn CJ Jung’s work on the mythology and the Collective Unconscious into forms digestible by average people, Gurdjieffians immediately seized on this as an opportunity to justify these strange Work ideas about higher centers, the unconscious, and Gurdjieff’s monstrous mythology in the Tales. The Tales was just like the traditional myths of many of the ancient cultures: it transmitted something to a deeper part of ourselves. Archetypal images deep in the subconscious responded, whether we knew it or not (for they were unconscious) to the material. We just have to “get out of the way” to let these influences enter. The shift from execises requiring extremely active attention to something passive curiously dances around any kind of rigorous reality testing. Anyone questioning this set of assumptions could simply be scapeogated as “trying to figure it out” too much, “being in their head”, etc.

In reality, we have hear a conflation of ignorance, one of the three Buddhist poisions, and true not knowing. Not knowing, in its real form, allows a person to learn new information, because they are always able to become a beginner. To use the ancient Indian metaphor, if a rope hanging from a tree looks like a snake such that the mind can believe it is, they are open to changing to thinking of the rope as a rope. Ignorance is the state of adhering to a point of view which is false: that the rope is a snake. It is the fact that the mind can form representations of reality which are false, and then become attached to those views, and then subsequently fight with others over those views, which caused spiritual traditions to warn about the mind. Not knowing allows all information in, and is able to amend itself with new views. This necessarily requires thinking. The thought that the rope is a snake must be replaced with a new thought: that the rope is a rope. The issue is not that thinking is present per se, but that thought may be misinformed. In the case of the snake and the rope, it may be afraid of something. In reality, the rope can be used to climb the tree to get away from some other wild animal. It leads to safety and away from fear rather than being something to fear sa a danger to one’s safety. Not knowing includes; ignorance excludes. Not knowing integrates; ignorance disintegrates.

The deficiency in the metaphor of the rope and snake lies in the fact that many ideas about reality are interdependent with others. Most aspects of reality which inform our decision making are based on extremely complicated interactions between categories of knowledge. Beelzebub’s Tales contends with ideas which are many-sided, as reality itself is. Gurdjieff, in struggling to convey his understanding, realized in using language that it stimulated other ideas and presuppositions in his students. Ultimately he decided to create an Exact Language in an attempt to convey a wholeness of thought never previously seen. The red herrings and absurdities are not to completely box out the analytical mind in favor of a subconsicous mind, but a delaying of premature conclusions to ensure proper and mature perception of a complicated idea or truth. What we see in the Work’s perception of Beelzebub’s Tales is precisely the kind of premature conclusion he was avoiding. In fact, we can see that Beelzebub’s Tales demonstrates this, using so-called students of the Work as unconscious, robotic demonstrators of precisely these principles.

People’s involvement with the Tales can be divided into a series of categories. For illustrative purposes, I break these up into ‘reader’. ‘student’, ‘practitioner’, ‘teacher.’

There is one type of “reader” who is exposed to the book temporarily or by the way. If the reader does not generally dabble in western esotericism they will find it as a kind of striking curiosity, or, more likely, reject it as out and out nonsense. For intsance, a person interested in philosphy and spirituality generally will at some point happen upon Gurdjieff’s name mentioned somewhere in some other context. If, however the reader is specifically interested in esoteric topics, particularly with a historical interest in early 20th century esotericism, they will have a vaguely positive stance toward the book, if not with any kind of apriori belief in its truth or falseness. Gurdjieff has a kind of legendary reputation within occult circles, though for most he is just one in a cast of characters from the time period, and doesn’t generate enough interest to actually buy and read his writings.

Then there are readers who are exposed to Gurdjieff’s writings regularly. These are folks in Gurdjieff Groups. Here again, there is a somewhat polarizing effect. Many in Gurdjieff groups have a kind of blank attitude toward the writings. The writings come up intermittently but are not a central object of attention for Work for most groups. Long time Gurdjieffians may tout the book, referring to this or that statement of Orage. Gurdjieff’s first generation pupils almost to a person emphasize the centrality of Beelzebub’s Tales, and many spent long years either working on what they considered a useful revision, as in the case of Jeanne De Salzmann, or starting publishing house to continue printing of the original, as in the case of Annie Lou Stavely, or, utilizing their group members like a colony of ants, compile a lengthy and involved compendium of dictionary terms, as with Willem Nyland. These teachers typically left group leaders behind who continue to read the book and to expose their pupils to it without understanding. Tyipcally, they have a series of mental content from the Oral Tradition which they understand to be the Work or the Gurdjieff Tradition by which they measure the Tales content. When something in the Tales seems to correspond to something in that mental conent, they seize upon it. Archangel Hariton’s system represents the Work idea that “anything can be useful for Work on myself.” When something in the Tales lands absolutely nowhere in this field of previous knowledge, these folks typically shrug and gloss over it, offer a lame excuse of some kind, or, if one of their students shows enough common sense to try to sort out what it might mean, they resort to the idea that the Tales is not for the “little mind” but is destined for some deeper, unconscious mind. This fickle and dishonest flitting from the notion that a metaphor can have an idea accurately applied to the idea one cannot apply any idea and that is the point is part and parcel of the so-called Oral Tradition of the Gurdjieff Work. Other members of Work groups find the Tales distasteful, especially many women, and generally hold their tongue and “wait it out” respectfully. Still other members of groups just kind of sniff at it and ignore it, waiting for someone else to take the lead, if lead they take. Usually there will be at least one member interested in esoteric topics generally, who finds things such as Gurdjieff’s “korkaptilnian thought tapes” correspond with the Akashic Records they have read about, or his angels and demons corresponds with their belief in angels, or that, like Edgar Cayce, Gurdjieff “channeled” knowledge, even of the future, he could not have known about. They take everything in positively. In general there is either a positive inclincation to affirm where things seem obvious or connect to the known, ignore when incomprehnsible, hold one’s tongue when offended, or simply remain blank. In all cases, these are “readers” or “listeners”, but not actual students of the book.

A student of the book, while not necessarily much better than the reader category, is a person who takes some level of personal interest in actually exploring something in the text. Nothing practical will come of simply studying the book because the exercises, which actually transform some cognitive toolkit present as a function in the brain, in a way similar to work with Meditation and Affirmations, are not yet discovered. However, they are in a phase of “preparation” with gurdjieff’s system of Symbolism. Gurdjieff was recorded by Ouspenksy as saying preparation was needed to understand Symbolism used to transmit objective conscioussness unit and multiplicity. The student is precisely someone in this phase. There will be no personal transformation, but they are undergoing a preparation to receive.

This phase, that of being a student, particularly throws people off. In our fast paced, consumeritic and business oriented world, people are taught for look for streamlined, efficient processes. Advertisers focus on carefully structure “Why” to inform buyers pricesely what they are going to get out of something. This has invaded spirituality also. While practicalism is important, it isn’t particularly helpful if a process has multiple epi-cycles as part of the overall journey. Anything with great depth has many side avenues which must be explored prior to assimilating them into a larger, more meaningful pattern. One can never foresee the end of a truly deep practice. The idea that one can “know” beforehand what the end of a process will be implies that, in some sense, the end of that process is already present in their cognition. For something truly new to enter, it must in fact be something completely unknown, baffling, and incongruent with the present pattern of perceptions, feelings, and sensations. The loss of attending to the unknown, the mysterious, and the esoteric is the cheapening of things generally.

Those within the Gurdjieff Work who do not become students of Beelzebub’s Tales through an entrenched anti-intellectualism regard the phase of Studenthood as empty intellectual practice. This is accurate in the sense that the process of preparation itself probably produces no visible results. This is wrongheaded for several reasons. First, they fail to recognize the invisible results. Just the act of attending to something outside of the box, despite the admonitions of traditionalists who believe the book is channeling something into the unconscious, is already preparing the students individuality, developing their persistence, and in general demonstrating their Wish to know. And any way, didnt Gurdjieff say not to expect results? That a great deal of preparation first was required? It is ironic precisely those unconcerned with results become extremely “practical” the moment an effort is required of them with regards to Gurdjieff’s writings. All the same, they continue to engage in Tasks derived from the Oral Tradition which are considered practical despite their affirmation they will not produce results. Second, they fail to see the longer view of how the preparation relates to future exercises. Just as in Hatha Yoga, it is wrong to immediately take complex or extreme postures without preliminary work on simpler ones, in the Tales there is are many preparatory characteristics required in the student before they may become a practitioner. Some of these, such as individuality, persistence, thoughtfulness, Wish, self-learning we have described, but there are others.

The phase of Student is potentially long and tedious. For most, there is little or no guidance, or, more commonly, precisely the wrong guidance is given in the books they read or in the culture surround Gurdjieff’s writings in the groups of which they are a part. For this reason, longstanding relationship with the book is rare. Most communities contain one or two idividuals reputed to be serious students of the Tales. In most cases, these individuals take the book literally, connect it with Moonshine from other esoteric lore, and in general are extremely poor represntations of the Tales possibilities.

The real purpose of the Student phase is to spend time forming the Postures and Gestures of the Tales. In a Movements class, time is spent without music taking the arms, or the legs, or the entire body position sequence, giving the dancer a chance to cognize what is being asked of them prior to taking it at speed with the piano music. Taking the positions in time with the music is the real exercise. In precisely the same way, it takes time for a student to collect all of the various pieces of the general puzzle in Beelzebub’s Tales. Only when much of the material is present in the cognizance of the Student are the proper allusions present in the reading of any given sentence. The result, ultimately, is that the Student begins to sense, feel, and understand the exercise present in the passage under observation. At this point, the Tales may be read at full speed and the exercise thus engaged. The Student is now a Practitioner.

And what we can say of a Practitioner or Teacher? Generally, a teacher is just someone who has done enough work with exercises to be able to help others form the postures and positions necessary to carry the Work out. Just as a cabinet maker must understand the phases necessary to build cabinets prior to teaching a class on cabinet making, a Movements demonstrator or Tales teacher must have actually engaged in the exercises of their “trade” enough to understand how it is put together. They must break it down into cognizable steps and understand how to help bring it up to speed. With the Tales, there is the added difficulty that thye must understand also the process of transitino from general public to readership, and from readership to actual Studenthood. In actuality, there is a distinction between Leadership and Teachership here. The act from Leading the Work, that is, definiing the Work in the present cultural moment of one’s society, means not only having carred out the practices of the tradition, but understanding them within the larger context of the world. From that understanding, a Work Leader can position the Work to be of use to other traditions or to augment the Work with the offerings present in the world in which they live. Certainly the neurological understands of the early 21st century and the explosion of research on meditation is relevant to Work sittings. The deep mystical experience teachings of other spiritual teachers should be taken into account as well. There is no reason to assume the Work is reality, but rather is a path to reality, a tool used a means which should be updated with the Times. Therfore a Work Leader must subsume all previous roles and have the wisdom to see how they interrelate.

A Teacher, on the other hand, need only understand the practices themselves and transmit them. The word transmit is rather lofty. In reality, a Teacher is someone who helps the Student learn how to form the Postures and Positions of the Sittings, Moveemnts, or Tales so they may become a Practitioner, and assits in creating an environment where Practitioner’s may continue to Work. If in the process they find they must creatively amend the way things are done for the benefit of their fellow practitioenrs or students, they naturally slide into the position of a Leader. As one can see, there is a natural flow along this continuum, the buildup of energy and insight from one phase leading organically to the next. It is only when a person prefers to ignore the problems and dilemmas of one phases, contenting themselves to circular perambulations at a given level, that they cease evolving to the next. In some cases, this is from a lack of integrity within the personality structure of the person, a failure of personal strength, and in others the misinformation of the active Leadership, who rather than being a true Leadership, really engages in protecting their own shortcomings along the path. One can see this in the cases where Leaders did not understand Beelzebub’s Tales and instead seized upon the idea it was for the subconscious at the expense of recognizes all the places where intentional thinking was required.

The small present moment is a tunnel vision view in which we only see what is right in front of us. This is related to bad habits and instant gratification, simpy appeasing the bill collector when they are knocking. The larger view brings in examining past experience to produce wisdom about acting in the future. Here, we see what is currently happening in its relationship to how it is preparing future present moments. We set money aside for the bill collector and never have to wince at the sound of them banging on the door.

So how to understand this in the context of the “present moment” touted in spiritual circles? The view that we should live in the present is a justifiable center of gravity for a life philosphy since human beings spend so much time dwelling in regret about the past, rehashing a conversation where one could have inserted the perfect quip to disarm an opponent, or in anxiety of the future, fearing whether people will admire one’s makeup and skirt at the gathering. Setting up contexts in which all worries may be eschewed in exchange for the simpicity of only drinking a cup of tea or walking through a forest forms an important balance to the heroin-like addiction of daily life anxieties.

The real issue comes when it is time to bring whatever equanimity was garnered in solitude, whether in retreat or in an early morning preparation, into daily life requirements of 21st century living. Threading being back into the fabric of life is akin to passing a camel through the eye of a needle for most. It is preceisely here that Gurdjieff’s philosphical system and being-practices are uniquely calibrated to help.

There is a larger present moment than the pseudo present moment of enjoying a beach vacation. The happiness of a trip to some sunny island has all the longevity of a soap bubble. A kind of false equivalence between various forms of exercise and meditation (running is my meditation) or between vacations afforded only to first world citizens exploiting the differences of exchange rate, inhabiting a mansion in a sunny resort when they can hardly afford a bungalow in their own country. These temporary experiences are not the nature of reality, and the basic happiness afforded through a connection to genuine reality.

In other words, for many, being in the moment really equates to one or another consumerist hobby. Of course one feels good after a vacation, or at least thinks one was happy while there (remembering self versus experiencing self). The instant back in life, however, they are back to being late on a job, resorting to blaming someone else for it, and so the web of lies and anxiety grows. In other words, the temporary reductino of mental activity made possible through retreats, while healthy, does not lead to genuine self-actualization and full human maturity.

The real question is how can one’s life responsbiilites themselves elicit the same being and sense of presence as activities sepcifically engaged in to move away from those responsibilities? This is where the larger present moment comes in.

There is a small present moment. This is the moment of a child. It becomes possible when engaing in activites which are simple enough in their composition that very little overhead and consideration is required to carry them out. As a result, the mind becomes less active, energy can settle, and one can freely flow from one thing to the next. This feels veyr freeing because ones natural instincts and impusles are allowed to simply flow out without any conscious mediation. It is the meditating of our moement to moment impusles and feelings which causes most of our pent up stress. This is why dogs seem so happy. There is no delay between their physical impulse or emotion and the action they take. Everything manifestation is in complete accord with their nervous system, with no break in the free flow of energy in and out of the system.

But humans, uniquely, live in time. As a result, humans have accumulated abundance in the form of stockpiles of goods. We thought in time and created crops. We learned to grow different types of crops through time thinking. We grew the poppy. The poppy, however, is addictive even though it gives a short term benefit. Due to this abundance we now see that we have powerful concentrations of highly addictive substances, pulling us into shrot term benefit cycles with long term detractions. These addiction cycles have the character of bad habits

good and bad habits. Good habits feel bad now, but are good overall and in long term. Bad habits feel good now but are bad overall and in long term. So our good habits agriculturally produce, in another sphere of life, bad habits, addictions, etc for others. This is the small present moment gone awry. If we truly corral our attention to the samll present moment, we d onot think of the consequences. Why select a displeasurable experience over a pleasurable experience in the present moment? There is no reason to.

Therefore in human life we can see that we need to think in time. Wisdom is produced by seeing the full circle, the full round of implications for a given activity. This is going beyond the small present moment and seeing every action in terms of the whole. The enneagram speaks brilliantly to this in the Gurdjieff work. Thinking in Time is the inevitable result of suffering the consequences of living in the small present moment which inevitably leads to hardship.

But there is a larger present moment. The larger present moment is seeing that Time itself, in the way we actually see and experience it, lies in the present. Our memory of the past is a present moment projection of the mind, and so is the projection of the future. All of these are present moment imagery perceived in the mind, with consequneces in our nervous system in its present physical states. In ones mind, one is in the past, ut in reality, there is simply a movie screen playing right now, and a set of reactions to that movie screen playing underneath. The realization that the mind can be watched and attended to as an object itself is an important stage in spiritual maturity. Learning to turn on and off the movie screen, or to play useful movies when they are needed is part of the training of the mind.

Octaves: Gurdjieff used the metaphor of musical octaves. This is helpful because we see that there is a holographic aspect to our thinking on these subjects. In octaves, we see recurrent notes that occur on different levels. Do plays again, but in a different octave. In ideas, we see a way in which similar concepts “rhyme”, although they dont exactly repeat.

In the case of the small present (false timeless)–>Time–> Larger Present (true timeless), we find this pattern. There is often an ignorance of practical realties in the spiritual person who believes they will find real Presence in pursuit of pleasurable temoprary experiences. This type of person will never be able to integrate this into their daily life. The development of wisdom in Time itself leads one inevtiably to the knowledge that the past and future are equally unknow. More and more one can focus one’s energies on what is actually known about the past and the future, which is to say, not as much as previously supposed, while letting go of what cannot be known in a way that is effective. The contemplation of one’s own perceptions of time in practical activities leads onto a larger unknown, what I have called the Larger Present. Gradually one realizes most of what oneself and others speak about does not in fact exist, or at the very least is subsumed in some vast picture far beyond the reach of human cognition.

This method is particularly powerfully integrative. Oddly, at the smae time one becomes highly effective practically, one’s deep contemplation of daily life activities leads one to the conclusion there is no Time. It is simply a present moment set of imagery which be utilized or not utilized as a mode of Being. The Time function of the mind is another piece of information to be used or not as needed. Time perceptions may form or not form in a given moment, but they are felt for what they are: just whisps of mental imagery forming and dissipating.

The fact that the timeless arises out of working deeply with activities in Time means the it has deeply woven itself into every aspect of ones life. This avoids the tragedy seen when meditators go into deep states which render them almost useless in any other setting than as obelisks of purity for lay people to go to for a bit of soothing from time to time. The division into the clergy and the laity forms a nearly insuperable barrier in most existing traditions, and the clergies Being, quite real and direct, nonethless remains context dependant and hardly manifests in any truly banal circumstances.

But in any case, these type of people will never help the general population reach a higher level. Rather, the culture itself, in its education system, in its art, in every sphere of activity, must gradually evolve as a totality, and this can only happen if the products of that culture partake in the socieities collective realizatino of larger time. Moreover, the structure of the society must take into account the process of awakening of individual human beings.