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

Meanwhile in the present case, I shall write partly in Russian and party in Armenian, the more readily
because among those people always "hanging around" me there are several who "cerebrate" more or less
easily in both these languages, and I meanwhile entertain the hope that they will be able to transcribe and
translate from these languages fairly well for me.
In any case I again repeat—in order that you should well remember it, but not as you are in the habit of
remembering other things and on the basis of which are accustomed to keeping your word of honor to
others or to yourself—that no matter what language I shall use, always and in everything, I shall avoid
what I have called the "bon ton literary language."
In this respect, the extraordinarily curious fact and one even in the highest degree worthy of your love of
knowledge, perhaps even higher than your usual conception, is that from my earliest childhood, that is to
say, since the birth in me of the need to destroy birds' nests, and to tease my friends' sisters, there arose in
my, as the ancient theosophists called it, "planetary body", and moreover, why I don't know, chiefly in
the "right half", an instinctively involuntary sensation, which right up to that period of my life when I
became a teacher of dancing, was gradually formed into a definite feeling, and then, when thanks to this
profession of mine I came into contact with many people of different "types", there began to arise in me
also the conviction with what is called my "mind", that these languages are compiled by people, or rather
"grammarians", who are in respect of knowledge of the given language exactly similar to those biped
animals whom the esteemed Mullah Nassr Eddin characterizes by the words: "All they can do is to
wrangle with pigs about the quality of oranges."
This kind of people among us who have been turned into, so to say, "moths" destroying the good
prepared and left for us by our ancestors and by time, have not the slightest notion and have probably
never even heard of the screamingly obvious fact that, during the preparatory age, there is acquired in the
brain functioning of every creature, and of man also, a particular and definite property, the automatic
actualization and manifestation of which the ancient Korkolans called the "law of association", and that
the process of the mentation of every creature, especially man, flows exclusively in accordance with this
law.
In view of the fact that I have happened here accidentally to touch upon a question which has lately
become one of my so to speak "hobbies", namely, the process of human mentation, I consider it possible,
without waiting for the corresponding place predetermined by me for the elucidation of this question, to
state already now in this first chapter, at least something concerning that axiom which has accidentally
become known to me, that on Earth in the past it has been usual in every century that every man, in
whom there arises the boldness to attain the right to be considered by others and to consider himself a
"conscious thinker", should be informed while still in the early years of his responsible existence that
man has in general two kinds of mentation: one kind, mentation by thought, in which words, always
possessing a relative sense, are employed; and the other kind, which is proper to all animals as well as to
man, which I would call "mentation by form."
The second kind of mentation, that is, "mentation by form", by which, strictly speaking, the exact sense
of all writing must be also perceived, and after conscious confrontation with information already
possessed, be assimilated, is formed in people in dependence upon the conditions of geographical
locality, climate, time, and, in general, upon the whole environment in which the arising of the given man
has proceeded and in which his existence has flowed up to manhood.
Accordingly, in the brains of people of different races and conditions dwelling in different geographical
localities, there are formed about one and the same thing or even idea, a number of quite independent
forms, which during functioning, that is to say, association, evoke in their being some sensation or other
which subjectively conditions a definite picturing, and which picturing is expressed by this, that, or the
other word, that serves only for its outer subjective expression.
That is why each word, for the same thing or idea, almost always acquires for people of different
geographical locality and race a very definite and entirely different so to say "inner-content."
In other words, if in the entirety of any man who has arisen and been formed in any locality, from the
results of the specific local influences and impressions a certain "form" has been composed, and this