Correspondences (Dec 2019)
The Concept of Human Self: George Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson
Abstract
The Greco-Armenian spiritual master George I. Gurdjieff (1866–1949) has remained an important figure in twentieth-century Western esoteric thought. Gurdjieff claimed that people do not have a stable self-identity or, more radically, a soul, but instead comprise a set of personalities. There is only an opportunity for further gradual and conscious development of the highest parts of human existence. Depending on personal effort and choice, this opportunity can be used or not. However, being under the influence of different personalities, people do not live but involuntary react to external events. Such automatism, according to Gurdjieff, is the result of abnormal conditions for human existence, which in turn are the outcome of a lack of knowledge of biological and cosmic laws. This article studies Gurdjieff’s discourse on the human self, initiated in his book Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, which was published in 1950 as the first part of the trilogy All and Everything. This study is not only a useful tool with which to illuminate Gurdjieff’s understanding of spiritual progress in the frame of Western esoteric thought but also a means to approach his concept of the self within so-called “self-spirituality.”
