Perfecting by Reasoning

2015-02-07

Beelzebub makes an interesting comment on page 437 in the chapter, The Fruits of Former Civilizations.  He says,

“You remember that when I explained to you how these favorites of yours define the ‘flow-of-time’ I said that when the organ Kundabuffer with all its properties was removed from their presences, and. they began to have the same duration of existence as all normal three-brained beings arising everywhere in our Universe, that is, according to what is called the Fulasnitamnian principle, they also should then have existed without fail until their ‘second-beingbody- Kesdjan’ had been completely coated in them and finally perfected by Reason up to the sacred ‘Ishmetch.’

What I found interesting was the phrase “…and finally perfected by Reason up to the sacred ‘Ishmetch’”. We do need to be careful about latching on to one quote as though it encapsulates absolute truth because we might find another quote a few pages later that says something quite different. However, it does appear that Gurdjieff is fairly consistent in referring to the process of perfecting by reason. In fact, prior to researching all of this I had no idea how much of an emphasis Gurdjieff puts on the reasoning process.  For example, in another place Beelzebub has this to say,

“These sciences, moreover, also passed from generation to generation and a number of them have reached the contemporary beings of that planet almost unchanged. “And hence it is that almost a half of what are called the ‘egoplastikoori’ arising in the Reason of the contemporary beings of that ill-fated planet, from which what is called a ‘being-world-outlook’ is in general formed in beings, are crystallized just from the ‘truths’ invented there by those bored fishermen and their subsequent generations.

The other day we worked with this diagram:

… and noted the mutual interaction between our reasoning process and the development of our personal cosmology, our way of understanding the world, or as Beelzebub terms it, our “being-world-outlook”. So it appears that we were on the right track, but I think we failed to see at that time how significant this mutual interaction really is.

We’ll post additional material on this as it arises.