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endlessness hears about this, he looks at the whole situation and he says, “Beelzebub, you are banished.” Most people look at that and their first reading is that’s a punishment. It’s not; it’s not at all a punishment! It is the only thing that Beelzebub lacks; he lacks reason–higher reason. How is he going to get that? He has to go all the way to the bottom. He has to be sent down where all this shit happens and see how it must work out the way in which the laws have said they must work out

Reason

Beelzebub has Conscience, he is, after all, a higher being, who is taken directly on to the Holy Sun Absolute, in service to endlessness. So, he can’t be a person, with an ordinary physical body like you or I. He has to have a higher body, already perfected, to qualify for going in service to the Holy Sun Absolute. And, he certainly has Conscience, since everybody with a Higher Being-body has Conscience. That’s where Higher Emotion and Higher Intellect blend together. So, Beelzebub goes on and he looks around, and he is disturbed by what he sees. He thinks that he sees something illogical in the way in which the world is working out.

MM: No doubt!

KB: He not only complains about it, but he sets about to get other people, or angelic or whatever higher being creatures to agree with him; he really goes at it. Why? Because of the force of his Will. His Will is an independent Will; it is his own and he must follow it. And, as Gurdjieff elaborates, he is young; he is inexperienced, but he is brilliant! He sees this that he thinks is illogical and he creates a big mess. He brings the central kingdom to a near revolution.

Well, when endlessness hears about this, he looks at the whole situation and he says, “Beelzebub, you are banished.” Most people look at that and their first reading is that’s a punishment. It’s not; it’s not at all a punishment! It is the only thing that Beelzebub lacks; he lacks reason–higher reason. How is he going to get that? He has to go all the way to the bottom. He has to be sent down where all this shit happens and see how it must work out the way in which the laws have said they must work out.

So, he ends up on Mars, in exile. Interestingly, he is on Mars, in this solar system–not on Earth; he’s not exiled to Earth. He can go to Earth, if he so chooses and he does six times, but his home is on Mars. In my simplistic mind, Earth is our third brain, essentially. The moon is the first brain, the physical body. Anulios is the little planet that even grandmothers aren’t talking about, is our emotional brain, the second brain.

So, Mars is our higher emotional center. This is the only home that is appropriate for Beelzebub, who is a very high Being. After all, Beelzebub comes down to Mars and then he is visited by Looisos, who is an angel. In the future, he becomes an Archangel; yet, he addresses Beelzebub as, “Your Reverence.” That’s a clear demarcation of the status of Beelzebub.

So, he is there on Mars, in what I consider to be higher emotional center, and then from there he observes what is going on on Earth. He becomes perplexed by some of what is going on, and then he becomes involved because of one of the stupid actions of one of his countrymen, who makes the same damn mistake that Beelzebub made back on Holy Sun Absolute. The young kinsman goes to Earth and thinks that he has figured things out. He knows what’s going on, and he tries and convinces the king to install a new policy, which gets the kinsman in trouble. Then all the other kinsmen, who are on Earth, have to pay the debts that the young kinsman has. Then, it isn’t enough and the call goes all the way back to Mars.

Finally, Beelzebub says, I need to go down to Earth and figure out what the hell this young man has gotten himself into. That’s the first of the six descents.

Then it goes through the rest of the descents in this marvelous, interesting story of how Beelzebub’s reason is tested. So, you can build an argument; the six descents are marvelously complex. You can’t say that they are just this at all; but, among other things, the six descents are really a demonstration of the increasing Reason of Beelzebub–in other words, what he comes to finally understand.

The first time, it is a very practical, straightforward thing; that you can’t mess with this world the way it is. You’ve got to accept it on its terms. So, when you go down to World 48, you’ve got to accept it. In our daily life, there isn’t any magical solution. We have got to accept it as it is. I am responsible as an adult. I am a human being, with a physical body. I am a male, etc. I’ve got to own up to those responsibilities. I’ve got to pay my taxes and all that. So, if I try and get out of it, then there is going to be self-suffering, but it’s the higher parts of me that do the suffering. The lower parts are simply the lower parts. They will complain, but it is the higher part that suffers–the kinsman, who came down from Mars to the Earth and meddled and muddled things up.

MM: Each of the descents is a learning opportunity in development, a stage of development.

KB: Sure, a test, exactly! And, you can just see when you go through, as he lays out each of the descents, what the issue is, what the question is. It is a beautifully enneagramatic sequence from that perspective. But, each of the descents is so many things of itself. Each of them has, I am sure, a physical, and emotional and an intellectual aspect to it, with questions arising out of those things.

It’s a great mythic stage, and creates the stage for Gurdjieff to color and to create these images that are colossal and true about us. All of the time, he is talking about our inner world.