A student asked:

I have heard the phrase “listening to the book in all three centers” and I am not clear on how it can be done.

Orage:

It isn't a matter of how it can be done, but of understanding what it means and then wishing to hear the book that way. Remember how you listened to stories you heard when you were a child, so that you participated, your hair stood on end and your eyes shone or you wept? That is reading with all three centers, and Gurdjieff would hope the book reading could be of that order.

A. R. Orage's commentaries on Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson are an essential part of the Fourth Way literature. They demonstrate a way of approaching and understanding a work that Orage considered to be literature of the highest kind. As the figures in Beelzebub are mythological and their language, parabolical, the book may not be easily comprehensible by the average reader or Fourth Way beginner. Orage's commentaries help to clarify and simplify the important lessons in the book by serving as keys to understanding Beelzebub which, as Gurdjieff once said, are all in the book, but not near their locks. Available to the reader for the first time in its entirety, this present volume promises a multifaceted illumination of Beezlebub.

Lawrence Morris

Books