Rating: 
Summary: Occult Landmarks
Review: With periodic study and endeavours focused on appliance of the ideas in this book, my evaluation of it has been through diverse shifts and mutations. Recent work `in the field' has turned a few more trusty impressions on their head. Gurdjieff himself: he would surely be turning in his grave for some of the pathetic not to say pathological activity now going on in the name of his System.
It is helpful to see Gurdjieff's work and message in the context of his times - to look towards what he was drawing on, lampooning, ignoring, or overtly acknowledging. Without some awareness of this, or alternate anchorage for thought, one is that degree more liable to dream on `inspired' with Gurdjieff's suggestions rather than aptly grasp and utilise any transformative power in them. Fine if we're happy to regard his work simply as some grand outlandish tapestry (and, in ourselves, to myopically replay the past). But we may be inclined to take it (and our potential) as something more significant.
"Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson" is a magnificent tour de force through the twists and turns of ego, that of the individual and that of associations and civilisations as living systems, self-aware entities, `cosmoses'. With chapter titles from "The Inevitable Result of Impartial Mentation" to "Just a Wee Bit More About the Germans", Gurdjieff sports with the reader's potentials to indulge a partiality, accommodate bias, our capacities for delusional identification and consciousness - as with his own blithe sex chauvinism, for example, one is pressed to ask if this is some `wicked' sense of humour, or why the purposes of the wise should disguise themselves and change as do the tricks of the ego. Certainly there is a fundamental joke here, a critically illuminating deceptiveness, to be found - to be discovered by readers in different times and ways, and to differing effect. I concur with those who believe Gurdjieff knew just what he was about in the writing of this book, including the provision of `clues' as to what would follow, what manner of things could complement and succeed this First Series beyond his own Second and Third. Some have seen and pursued this succession or complementarity in the offerings of Subud, encounter therapy, Shah, Krishnamurti, Trungpa, Castaneda, Osho, besides the assortment of present day Gurdjieffian groups and gurus. For a different kettle of fish, one new resource warrants particular mention. M J Mitchell's "The Hog's Wholey Wash --" one can come to appreciate as hailing from a related space or cause to that of the Tales, a canny `legominism' in a world context a half-century on. By volume but a postage stamp on Beelzebub's Tales, in essence, in its quickening depths of humanity and paradox, it is of no less magnitude. Mitchell's `hogwash' packs the tightest metaphorical punches, and rings with the Tales as a hearty wake-up call - as a further worker-friendly appliance for self-awakening, self-remembering. In the architecture of Gurdjieff's "great lumbering flying cathedral" (P L Travers) there remains as much direct incitement to percipience in awareness, to radical aliveness, as bidding towards germane practice and research.
George Gurdjieff's "Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man", along with western society's digestion, indigestion and non-digestion of it, is objectively or otherwise a dynamic part of the context in which a variety of human and developmental initiatives today stand to be viewed.
Rating: 
Summary: Warning!
Review: _Beezlebub's Tales to His Grandson_ is the ultimate Russian novel. This book might also be among the first true science fiction novels ever written. Although most of this book is fairly readable, the process is made much more difficult by the fact that Gurdjieff is constantly inventing new words. Not only that, these words have many different sub-definitions and connotations. It is very important that you get out a pad of paper and write down your interpretations of Gurdjieff's new vocabulary as you go along. Try to derive the meanings of these words through the context of the sentence, and write down the meanings as best you can. Then remember to continually add nuances to your definitions as Gurdjieff introduces slightly different usages and connotations for his words. This might sound troublesome, but deriving the definitions of the words from the context clues in the sentence is not that difficult. Just take my advice and WRITE DOWN THE DEFINITIONS. Otherwise, the new words and all their different connotations will prove to be too much to contain in your head all at once, and you will lose the handle on it.That said, this book is quite fascinating, and very important philosophically. It is unquestionably a great work, and is worth the trouble it takes to read it. If it were not for the extreme length and difficulty, I would have given it five stars.
Rating:
Summary: Warning!
Review: _Beezlebub's Tales to His Grandson_ is the ultimate Russian novel. This book might also be among the first true science fiction novels ever written. Although most of this book is fairly readable, the process is made much more difficult by the fact that Gurdjieff is constantly inventing new words. Not only that, these words have many different sub-definitions and connotations. It is very important that you get out a pad of paper and write down your interpretations of Gurdjieff's new vocabulary as you go along. Try to derive the meanings of these words through the context of the sentence, and write down the meanings as best you can. Then remember to continually add nuances to your definitions as Gurdjieff introduces slightly different usages and connotations for his words. This might sound troublesome, but deriving the definitions of the words from the context clues in the sentence is not that difficult. Just take my advice and WRITE DOWN THE DEFINITIONS. Otherwise, the new words and all their different connotations will prove to be too much to contain in your head all at once, and you will lose the handle on it. That said, this book is quite fascinating, and very important philosophically. It is unquestionably a great work, and is worth the trouble it takes to read it. If it were not for the extreme length and difficulty, I would have given it five stars.
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