Yesterday, I completed my first reading of Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson. I started reading it in November 2016. I actually read the entire first volume (out of three) because someone online told me that was the best way to understand Gurdjieff. LOL, it wasn't. After a few hundred pages, I gave up and decided that if I wanted to learn anything, I'd have to go to a meeting with real people.
As I've mentioned in this thread, Beelzebub's Tales is a real challenge to read. Complicated ideas & symbols are shared in a torturously worded way which forces you to maintain sharp concentration. It's not a book you can skim or read while drowsy. In fact, a good chunk of the first chapter consists of Gurdjieff trying to turn you away. If you're looking for an excuse to stop reading, he gives you many.
Is it worth the read? I have a hard time answering that because the answer is so subjective. In an Aftermathematics Research Cabal meeting, Enki once asked me if he were to 'dig in that yard', if he would find anything. How could I answer that? How would I predict if you, personally, will find the treasure Gurdjieff buried so carefully? It's like asking if you'll get anything from reading the Bible, or the Principia Discordia. The answer's 50% book, 50% you.
Enki was kind of asking... is there a real meat to it? or is it hard for hard's sake, like some mental treadmill?
It's got a lot going on. It's said to be written "on seven levels", and the words themselves are only one level. Thinking about what you just read often reveals more meaning, maybe that's part of it... And yes, the effort required to dig up these insights does give them a sort of aura. You "paid" for them, after all, invested time and effort into finding them... It's interesting to observe how that works, internally.
Maybe the better question is, are you interested in alchemy? In how lead turns into gold? in how dreaming consciousness can turn into a true waking consciousness? Because the work needed to do that, in the self, and the work needed to read the book, are analogical processes.
But where I'm sitting right now, it feels wrong to describe the book in terms of what it might give you, like understanding it is some accomplishment valuable all by itself, an achievement to add to your character sheet. I found that I had good results approaching the book not as a piece of content, but as a process. In order to read Beelzebub's Tales, I needed to be in a certain state: A state of interest, a desire for a certain something (something which may be better to leave unstated).
At one point in In Search of the Miraculous, Ouspensky says that something omitted from many spiritual / philosophical searches is that the 'big cosmic questions and mysteries' might only be fruitful to contemplate when you're in a certain state. You might call it an emotional state. Receptive, but also capable of creating internal order or disorder. What is this state, and how do you arrive at it? This is a holy question.
because whatever it is I'm doing with my life .... I'm usually too zoomed in to see it and evaluate it. I can only see it from that state.
At the very end of Beelzebub's Tales, Gurdjieff includes a From the Author section where he addresses the audience directly. He explains, in [relatively] plain language, why he wrote the book the way he did, and what his message is. If I've been blindfolded and feeling an elephant spot by spot, that essay is like a little miniature elephant. Much easier to feel the entire shape, when it's small like that. It feels like the book desposited enough material underneath the surface that when I read this essay, it shined with a real gnostic intensity. If I'd read it before reading the whole freakin book, before I had obsessed over and integrated these ideas, I don't know that it would have had the same richness. I almost wish I'd started reading the book, back in November 2016, with that chapter.
In the first chapter, Gurdjieff says his goal is to “destroy, mercilessly . . . the beliefs and views about everything existing in the world.”
tl;dr
he succeeded
