Orage S Commentary On Gurdjieff S Beelzebub S Tales To His Grandson

This title presents Orage's commentaries on 'Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson', which are an essential part of the Fourth Way literature. They demonstrate a way of approaching and understanding a work that Orage considered to be literature of the highest kind.

"Originally written in Russian and Armenian.

Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson is the first volume of the All and Everything trilogy written by the mystic G. I. Gurdjieff. The All and Everything trilogy also includes Meetings with Remarkable Men and Life Is Real Only Then, When 'I Am'. This book was intended to be the main study tool for Gurdjieff's Fourth Way teachings. As Gurdjieff's idea of "work" is central to those teachings, Gurdjieff went to great lengths in order to increase the effort needed to read and understand it.The book covers many topics. Beelzebub's Tales is included in Martin Seymour-Smith's 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written, with the comment that it is "...the most convincing fusion of Eastern and Western thought that has yet been seen."

This book demonstrates that the most forceful contribution to George Gurdjieff's world-view is Sufism, understood as the tradition of seeking truth wherever it can be found, especially at the meeting place of the world religions. Gurdjieff's masterpiece, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, is philosophically analyzed in its use of literary devices to jolt the reader into radical transformation.

This book is a thoroughly edited version of the original 1931 manuscript of Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson by G. Gurdjieff. The text is, for the most part, unchanged from the original manuscript that was published in a limited edition in 1931 under the direction of A R Orage. However some editing to the text has been done to remove obvious typographical errors and to harmonize the spelling of Gurdjeiff's many invented names and neologisms to align with the later published version of this classic literary work. In addition a full index is provided, almost to the level of a concordance. It documents all changes to the neologisms and all edits, aside from typographical corrections made to the text. The attraction of this publication lies in the fact that although Gurdjieff approved this original edition for publication and hence regarded his writing effort as almost complete, he subsequently made significant changes to many parts of it, and hence reading the 1931 Manuscript at times feels as though one is reading a different book, but one that nevertheless bears the mark of its author.

"This is the first analysis of all of Gurdjieff's published internal exercises, together with those taught by his students, George and Helen Adie. It includes a fresh biographical study of Gurdjieff, with ground-breaking observations on his relationships with P.D. Ouspensky and A.R. Orage (especially, why he wanted to collaborate with them, and why that broke down). It shows that Gurdjieff was, fundamentally, a mystic, and that his contemplation-like methods were probably drawn from Mt Athos and its hesychast tradition. It shows the continuity in Gurdjieff's teaching, but also development and change. His original contribution to Western Esotericism lay in his use of tasks, disciplines, and contemplation-like exercises to bring his pupils to a sense of their own presence which could, to some extent, be maintained in daily life in the social domain, and not only in the secluded conditions typical of meditation. It contends that he had initially intended not to use contemplation-like exercises, as he perceived dangers to be associated with these monastic methods, and the religious tradition to be in tension with the secular guise in which he first couched his teaching. As Gurdjieff adapted the teaching he had found in Eastern monasteries to Western urban and post-religious culture, he found it necessary to introduce contemplation. His development of the methods is demonstrated, and the importance of the three exercises in the Third Series, Life Is Real only then, when 'I Am', is shown, together with their almost certain borrowing from the exercises of the Philokalia. G.I. Gurdjieff P.D. Ouspensky A.R. Orage George Adie Mysticism Meditation Contemplation Fourth Way Hesychasm Western Esotericism"--