John Amaral

Title of Paper: Some Explorations of I Am, I Wish, I Can

In the daily self-re-membering exercise “I am, I wish, I can,” specific expressions are evoked. What are the meanings of these expressions? For example, if “I am” is an expression evocative of potential “Will-Being”, what does this mean for me in the exercise, and what do the other expressions in the exercise mean to me? In this paper, I intend to give a sense of possibilities in the exercise, some of which may have been ordinarily missed.

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Biography

John Amaral was born in Long Beach, California, raised by Catholic nuns, and trained in Electrical Engineering and Music. He has studied Gurdjieff with students of Mr. Nyland, Mrs. Staveley and Mrs. Popoff, and began to attend the A&E Conferences in 2003. “Perhaps the most useful aspect of the Conference for me has been that it has helped me to develop a more inclusive perspective about ways of Working. It has also opened for me new vistas of interesting inspiring contacts.”

Sy Ginsburg

Title of Paper: The Ray of Creation Revisited

The purpose of this suggested revision to the presentation of the Ray of Creation is two-fold:

To accommodate the idea that the descending Ray of Creation in the materialization descends in the first instance into multiple universes. Recent theories in astrophysics suggest that there are multiple universes just as there are multiple galaxies within our universe. William James in 1895, coined with word “multiverse” to describe multiple simultaneous universes.
To eliminate the idea that the planets taken as a whole represent a greater level of freedom from the operation of the Sacred Triamazikamno (law of 3 forces) than does Earth taken as a single planet. All our planets revolve around the Sun. Therefore, all of them are subject to the same level of limitation of freedom. The group is no more free than is an individual planet.

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Biography

Sy Ginsburg was born in Chicago in 1934 and currently resides in Florida. He was introduced to the Gurdjieff Work by Sri Madhava Ashish, an eminent theosophical scholar and Hindu monk, who became his mentor over a 19 year period. Ginsburg was a member of the Gurdjieff Society of Florida and later a co-founder of the Guidjieff Institute of Florida. Currentty, he is a Director of The Theosophical Society in Miami & South Florida and facilitator of the Gurdjieff Study Group at The Theosophica1 Society.

Michael Readshaw

Title of Paper: Why is that transformation, which Gurdjieff so wished for us with all his Being, and to achieve which he wrote Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, necessary, and how is it achieved?

As soon as he can, in Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, Gurdjieff makes the following claim:

“Concerning all this it must be said that neither the organ Kundabuffer which their ancestors had is to blame, nor its consequences which, owing to a mistake on the part of certain Sacred Individuals, were crystallised in their ancestors and later began to pass by heredity from generation to generation.”

“But they themselves were personally to blame for it, and just on account of the abnormal conditions of external ordinary being-existence which they themselves have gradually established . . . “( Ch. 13. Why in Man’s Reason Fantasy may be perceived as Reality. p. 104/105 )

And then this: “You yourself will very well understand that although the fundamental causes of the whole chaos that now reigns on that ill-fated planet Earth were certain ‘unforseeingnesses,’ coming from Above on the part of various Sacred Individuals, yet nevertheless the chief causes for the developing of further ills are only those abnormal conditions of ordinary being-existence which they themselves gradually established and which they continue to establish down to the present time.” ( Ch. 16 The Relative Understanding of Time.p.132/133)

In this talk, Mike analyses the expression ‘the abnormal external conditions of ordinary being-existence established by them themselves,’ – a phrase which Gurdjieff uses 153 times, in one form or another, in BT, to completely define the causes of our present sorry state – word for word, in order to find out what are these conditions, that is, what is wrong with us, how and why we establish these conditions ourselves, and hence he establishes why Gurdjieff wrote Beelzebub’s Tales in order to transform us, and how that transformation is achieved.

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Biography

Mike Readshaw first read Beelzebub’s Tales at University, where he obtained a degree in Mathematics, specializing in Mathematical Logic. A meeting with Rina Hands indirectly led to him producing a number of audio talks, the first of which, “Reading Gurdjieff,” exposed the difference between Gurdjieff’s own writings and the established Gurdjieff canon of thought. This was much praised by Mrs. Annie Staveley, but after a serious climbing accident in the Alps, Mike was distracted and had to re-learn to walk, married, and trained as a teacher. He lived in France for a number of years before family circumstances forced him back to England. Mike is a widower, with five children in his care, and teaches Mathematics in the north of England. Knowing that personality has ideas whilst essence has insights, his most recent work consists of devising 365 completely original sayings with the intention of raising the overall level of awareness of those in contact with him, based upon the principle that: A good saying stops all thought so that understanding can fill that vacuum.

Dimitri Peretzi

Title of Paper: Conscience and Consciousness in the Tales

The talk traces the way the author applies these two terms, “Conscience” and “Consciousness”, in the text of “Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson” and compares the connotations of their use with the meaning given to them by contemporary Science and Philosophy of Mind. The importance of the philosophical study of Consciousness over the last two decades, has rendered the concept a key for the formation of any theory about the Mind and the operation of the brain. The way the two terms are used in the Tales gives clues about the way Gurdjieff views the Mind and point toward a coherent and quite advanced theory proposed for its structure.

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Biography

Mr. Peretzi is the president of the Gurdjieff Foundation of Greece. With reference to his personal contacts with eminent students of Gurdjieff, Lord Pentland, Madame de Salzmann, Dr. Welch and others, he has authored a number of books and articles that study the problem of consciousness, relating views from the esoteric traditions to those of of the contemporary philosophy of mind. Mr. Peretzi did graduate work in Philosophy, at Yale, where he received his Master of Architecture. Having settled since 1974, he established his own Construction and Prefabication Company.

Paul Taylor

Title of Paper: Beelzebub Alien

It is not unusual for a reader of Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson to be so taken up with the story that he forgets the spatial point of view of the narrator, who is an alien, an extra-terrestrial, if you will, with non-human physical and mental characteristics, including narrative orders of action, place and time. Every word he relates to his grandson Hassein is spoken in outer space aboard an intergalactic vehicle, though most of what he relates concerns his experiences on Earth, where he is both listener and teller of tales. Although the Tales are stories related in space about space, as far as I have been able to discover, Gurdjieff’s work seems not merit more than cursory notice of in of the countless studies of the plurality of worlds and travels to and between them. Gurdjieff’s reader is also likely not to care that Beelzebub, as an extra-terrestrial voyager observing the activities of humans on Earth, is just one of a legion of otherworldly beings who have been visited and engaged humans in recorded story. The striking difference, however, is that Beelzebub is a visitor to Earth rather than a receiver of visits from Earth.

The stages in the development of stories of aliens in the western world develop from Aristotle’s, Plato’s and Heraclitus’s scientific inquisitions into the shape and content of space. Following them, scientists and story-tellers consider possibilities of travel by inhabitants of the Earth into space in order where they find a fresh view of present, past, and future mortal activities of mankind from an extraterrestrial point of view. In more recent times, writers have portrayed aliens from superior cultures who, like Orson Welles’ Martians, invade Earth, or like Swedenborg’s angels, Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub and Ashiata Shiemash, visit Earth for the good of mankind.

Gurdjieff had many models in the long history of extra-terrestrial travel to draw upon for the form and function of his protagonist Beelzebub. The science fiction and fantastic story of more recent times do not concern him. He is, rather, interested in delineating a historical trace of human civilizations and an “objective” criticism of man’s behaviour. He accomplishes this by widening and deepening the genre of spatial travel by conjoining with it fresh ideas about human culture from a perspective that is reminiscent of the writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg.

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Biography

Prof. Taylor lived for some years with Jean Toomer in New York and Pennsylvania as a young boy, studied with Gurdjieff in Paris after World War 2, before turning to a teaching career in Medieval Germanic languages and literature, first in Iceland and for the past thirty years in Geneva, where he lives with his wife and two teenage children.

Arkady Rovner

Title of Paper: Gurdjieff’s “Beelzebub’s Tales” – A Landmark of the Spiritual History of Humanity

One of the most important books written in the last century, “Beelzebub’s Tales” is, according to its genre an epic poem comparable with the number of works pertaining to the same genre, such as: the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Koran, the Upanishads, the Mahayana Sutras, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Dante’s Divine Comedy, François Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, Helen Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine and some others. Most of these works are considered to be landmarks of the spiritual history of humanity, albeit in different degrees.

These works often carry in themselves new metaphysical principles, new cosmological and historical concepts, new codes of behavior and ideals of human existence, predictions and prophecies said to be obtained through spiritual revelation. The authorship of or inspiration for many of these works has been ascribed to Almighty God or to the Spirits closest to Him, as well as to Archangels, Angels, prophets or legendary beings.

A special kind of sacredness has been attributed to these works, and they have been made objects of exclusive reverence and worship as well as of systematic study and commentary, the latter sometimes leading to creation of special kinds of disciplines, e.g. Christian theology, midrashim, kalam, etc. Special rituals for handling these books and special manners of recitation have been created and particular schedules and orders of their private and communal recitation have been established. Many of these works have been considered to contain special secret content, a “bone” or “a dog” buried in them which the devoted reader is supposed to dig out. Some of these works have been engaged in the process of enculturation, i.e. incorporation of their content and style into the various layers of existing culture. As a result of constant recitations, quoting and references, some of these poems acquire the character of a warrant of objective Truth, as they have solidified in an inert culture and their ideas have ceased to develop and grow, thus becoming an infallible dogmas.

The aim of this presentation is to pose and to make attempt of answering the following question: How could we avoid the danger of pitfalls contained in the uncritical attitude towards Gurdjieff’s main work?

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Biography

Arkady Rovner was born in 1940 in Odessa, USSR and spent his youth in Tbilisi, Georgia. He studied at Moscow State University and Columbia University, New York. He taught numerous courses on world religions and contemporary mysticism at the New York University, the State University of New York, the New School for Social Research and the Moscow State Humanitarian University.

He was introduced to Gurdjieff’s ideas and practices in Moscow, Russia in 1965 and has been an adherent of the Gurdjieff Work ever since then. During the years 1975-1984 he was in constant communication with Lord Pentland, the head of the American branch of Gurdjieff Foundation. In the summer of 1980, with a letter of reference from Lord Pentland, he travelled to London and Paris where he met and interviewed a number of Ouspensky’s and Gurdjieff’s former disciples, including Mr. Tilley and P. L. Travers, as well as Michael de Salzmann.

Seminars 2011

Terje Tonne – Chapter 33

Steve Aronson – Chapter 32

Dimitri Peretzi – Meetings Chapter 7

Abstracts 2011

Seminars 2011

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