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Part of the endlessness that Gurdjieff is trying to communicate about the nature of our world and the nature of endlessness–that there are hazards that are absolutely unpredictable, that even endlessness doesn’t know about.

In the Great Traditions, one of the unfortunate things that comes through in the minds of many people is that there is some kind of perfect order, there is some kind of perfection that we all can be aligned to and that we should follow, etc. Gurdjieff is, I think, opening a door, because you can’t forcibly do this kind of thing. You have to make it possible for people to begin to see that it is not like that; that is an endlessly creative circumstance. So, there is no set of laws that say, immutably, this is what shall be. No. There is always what Gurdjieff called the “law of hazard” or the “law of Seven.” There are always gaps; there are always interrelationships that are absolutely unpredictable - even for endlessness. So, things can happen that are big surprises, or unexpected, unanticipated kind of results. They are all lawful, you see.

This is the paradox that many people, I think, in their religious dispositions, have a really hard time with–that there can be a lawfulness that allows for tragic mistakes, for accidents to happen. Gurdjieff puts this in the myths and in the Tales [Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson], it’s right there on page 1. He has this nascent Earth appearing and it’s still warm and it hasn’t developed an atmosphere yet. Then this comet comes along and bashes right into it. Then all hell breaks loose because two fragments fly off. Now, all of a sudden you’ve got this nearly cosmic calamity that has to be averted.

So, he starts the whole of the Tales with this hazard that has suddenly manifested itself. He speaks about, for instance, that the cause of this comet slamming into the Earth is not that comets don’t move; they are very lawful kinds of things. And it’s not that it moves through this particular point in space, because the Earth could have been moving through another part of space at that time. So, what is the critical determinant here that he does not speak of overtly, but it is right there in front of you, if you look at it? That is Time.

So, Time and what Gurdjieff then calls his concept of the “Heropass”–the Heropass is process; it is timing–many things can have a timing that, even though they are rigidly lawful in themselves, can produce a hell of a mess, when you really put the whole process in motion. That’s part of the endlessness that Gurdjieff is trying to communicate about the nature of our world and the nature of endlessness–that there are hazards that are absolutely unpredictable, that even endlessness doesn’t know about, in the sense of prehension and so forth. But, there are laws and the laws are immutable; they cannot be changed.

Laws Over Omniscient

This is another thing that is a major differentiation of Gurdjieff’s concept of God. Almost all the Great Traditions, not so much the Eastern, the Buddhist and the Hindu, but certainly the Western traditions, there is a defect in the laws set down by endlessness. For instance, the Western view of God allows that He can enter into the Universe now, today, and produce miracles or produce great suffering on the part of people who don’t do what He tells them to do, and so on, and so on. We’ve got lots and lots of history of that kind of thing. How much of that is fantasy and how much is myth? That’s not my point. My point is that many people still believe that God can intervene. One of the most startling and repetitious points that Gurdjieff tried to get across is that the world is not made like that. Gurdjieff has angels and archangels all throughout the Tales, who are part of the creative unfolding of the Universe, but, again, lawfully. These entities or powers or laws, however you see that embodiment of them, in angels or archangels or whatever, they have limited powers. They make big mistakes. In his myth, there are other examples of this, for instance, he calls one of the most serious impositions the implantation of “Kundabuffer” into early Man, in early life. He calls this, later in the Tales, “a nearly unforgiveable sin,” but this was imposed by, supposedly, the High Commission.

So, we see this introduction, again on Gurdjieff’s part, that there are Higher Powers but they are not aware of everything; they are not omniscient. Things can happen within the law at that level that will very seriously create difficulties in another world, and there is no way out of it. There is no way to prevent that kind of thing from happening. Why? Because that’s the law and God, even endlessness, cannot intervene.

This is, again, a very important conception of Gurdjieff’s relative to the concept of God: the laws that obtain in the Universe are there at the opening, actually before the opening, before what he calls the “Emanation,” which initiates the whole of the Universe. The laws are established before that. Once established, even God, even endlessness cannot intervene, cannot change the laws; they are already set before the creation.

This may not seem like a very important differentiation for some people. For me, it’s a very important differentiation because it means that we cannot expect intervention, if you will, on the part of endlessness in the process of our daily or communal life. If things are going to Hell in a hand basket, which they most certainly seem to be around us today, then we are responsible for that. There is no way out. We cannot pray our way out of that, or beseech the Lord to intervene and change the laws; the laws are the laws. And Gurdjieff is so insistent on just pounding at that point: that is the source of evil in this world.

Evil ‘out there’

This is another major differentiation of Gurdjieff about endlessness and about a new concept of God–there is no separate evil that exists out there somewhere in the Universe, and that invades the space of Man, and so forth. Man is the source of evil–that we are, through our egoism and our selfishness. It is not that we have a devil speaking in our ear; it is that we fall and are trapped and identified with our own puffed up sense of ourselves and of how we want everything to be our way, so we become greedy and suspicious and violent towards each other, and so forth. We are the source of that. Gurdjieff spent immense energy in the Tales and in his other writings, and in his teaching in a daily life sense, trying to get this point across over and over and over. The source of evil in this world is you and me. We are the source. There is no such “other” entity out there.

He claims this is one of the great mistakes of the Babylonian Civilization, that they introduced what he called the “System of Duality,” that there can be Good and Evil, and they are separate, distinct things. No, it’s not like that at all. So, this is a big part of the new concept of God, as well.