Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson: An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man

Gurdjieff's magnum opus and the first series of All and Everything — a vast allegorical work in which the being Beelzebub, traveling through the cosmos aboard a spacecraft, recounts to his grandson Hassein the history of human civilization and its deviations from cosmic law. Through this elaborate mythological framework, Gurdjieff delivers his most complete statement of his ideas: the nature of consciousness, the mechanicalness of man, the organ Kundabuffer, the cosmic purposes served by organic life, and the reasons why humanity has repeatedly lost access to genuine knowledge across the millennia. Gurdjieff designed the book deliberately to resist easy reading, advising that it be read three times — once mechanically, once aloud to another, and only then with the aim of grasping its meaning. He intended the First Series to destroy, without compromise, the rooted beliefs and views the reader brings to it. Dense, digressive, frequently comic, and written in a style unlike anything else in world literature, Beelzebub's Tales is considered by many Fourth Way students to be inexhaustible — a book that yields new meaning at each stage of inner development.