"Gurdjieff, G I - Beelzebubs Tales To His Grandson" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gurdjieff G I)

bring back a certain book.
When this great unconscious author of the "all-universal principle of living" arrived in Moscow, he
together with a friend of his became—as was and still is usual there—"blind drunk" on genuine "Russian
vodka."
And when these two inhabitants of this most great contemporary grouping of biped breathing creatures
had drunk the proper number of glasses of this "Russian blessing" and were discussing what is called
"public education", with which question it has long been customary always to begin one's conversation,
then our merchant suddenly remembered by association his dear son's request, and decided to set off at
once to a bookshop with his friend to buy the book.
In the shop, the merchant, looking through the book he had asked for and which the salesman handed
him, asked its price.
The salesman replied that the book was sixty kopecks.
Noticing that the price marked on the cover of the book was only forty-five kopecks, our merchant first
began pondering in a strange manner, in general unusual for Russians, and afterwards, making a certain
movement with his shoulders, straightening himself up almost like a pillar and throwing out his chest like
an officer of the guards, said after a little pause, very quietly but with an intonation in his voice
expressing great authority:
"But it is marked here forty-five kopecks. Why do you ask sixty?"
Thereupon the salesman, making as is said the "oleaginous" face proper to all salesmen, replied that the
book indeed cost only forty-five kopecks, but had to be sold at sixty because fifteen kopecks were added
for postage.
After this reply to our Russian merchant who was perplexed by these two quite contradictory but
obviously clearly reconcilable facts, it was visible that something began to proceed in him, and gazing up
at the ceiling, he again pondered, this time like an English professor who has invented a capsule for
castor oil, and then suddenly turned to his friend and delivered himself for the first time on Earth of the
verbal formulation which, expressing in its essence an indubitable objective truth, has since assumed the
character of a saying.
And he then put it to his friend as follows:
"Never mind, old fellow, we'll take the book. Anyway we're on a spree today, and 'if you go on a spree
then go the whole hog including the postage'. "
As for me, unfortunately doomed, while still living, to experience the delights of "Hell", as soon as I had
cognized all this, something very strange, that I have never experienced before or since, immediately
began, and for a rather long time continued to proceed in me; it was as if all kinds of, as contemporary
"Hivintzes" say, "competitive races" began to proceed in me between all the various-sourced associations
and experiences usually occurring in me.
At the same time, in the whole region of my spine there began a strong almost unbearable itch, and a
colic in the very center of my solar plexus, also unbearable, and all this, that is these dual, mutually
stimulating sensations, after the lapse of some time suddenly were replaced by such a peaceful inner
condition as I experienced in later life once only, when the ceremony of the great initiation into the
Brotherhood of the "Originators of making butter from air" was performed over me; and later when "I",
that is, this "something-unknown" of mine, which in ancient times one crank—called by those around
him, as we now also call such persons, a "learned man"—defined as a "relatively transferable arising,
depending on the quality of the functioning of thought, feeling, and organic automatism", and according
to the definition of another also ancient and renowned learned man, the Arabian Mal- el-Lel, which
definition by the way was in the course of time borrowed and repeated in a different way by a no less
renowned and learned Greek, Xenophon, "the compound result of consciousness, subconsciousness, and
instinct"; so when this same "I" in this condition turned my dazed attention inside myself, then firstly it
very clearly constated that everything, even to each single word, elucidating this quotation that has
become an "all-universal life principle" became transformed in me into some special cosmic substance,
and merging with the data already crystallized in me long before from the behest of my deceased