When you go back to the early 1931 manuscript of Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, it’s interesting that the word “God” appears very frequently. In the 1950 edition, not exclusively, but with a surprising preponderance, he has changed many of those expressions to “endlessness.” I choose to think that this is very significant insight.
Now, when you go back to the early 1931 manuscript of Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, it’s interesting that the word “God” appears very frequently. In the 1950 edition, not exclusively, but with a surprising preponderance, he has changed many of those expressions to “endlessness.” I choose to think that this is very significant insight. If you are going to talk about God, then you’ve got to do everything you can to move away from the automatic reflection inside of people about what God is, because as soon as you say God, all of their upbringing, all of what he called their “Itoklanoz” from their families, from their religious exposure, etc., they all come up with this concept, this notion of God. If anything, he very gently wanted to dismember that and create a new concept. That new concept, it really is heralded, in a sense, by his use of the term “endlessness.” his endlessness is endless; it’s not a singularity; it’s not defined; it’s not anthropomorphized; it’s simply endless.
Part of the automaticity is that we create these “Is,” and all of a sudden we’ve got this bag full, this I or that I, and it’s all automatic, but it’s all fantastic because it’s unreal. So, that was all, again, part of what Gurdjieff tried mightily to get across. If you’re going to have a concept of God, you can’t fall into the same trap inside of yourself. You can’t make it yourself, you know? You have to really see the edge of endlessness inside of yourself–we are in relationship; we are resonant with the rest of the world.
That was another chief emphasis of Gurdjieff, which he shares with all of the great teachers. They all speak about this equivalence, this resonance between an individual human being and endlessness. But, he took this up in, I think, a very straightforward way.
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