Gurdjieff International Review

Superforce and Beelzebub

by Jyri Paloheimo

Our day-to-day existence is cyclic and to a large extent characterized by repetition. Night follows day and one season another. Our activities follow an almost equally rigid pattern. What we do today is much the same as what we did yesterday. Life as we know it is very ‘Newtonian,’ i.e., predictable and mechanical, interrupted only by accidents, both good and bad, over which we have little control. The final and inevitable ‘accident’ is the cessation of life for each one of us.

This was also the view that we had of the universe before the emergence of new developments in physics—relativity theory and quantum physics in particular. Everything was mechanical and, at least in theory, calculable. Matter, except in solar furnaces or in the thin film of organic life coating the earth’s surface, was essentially stable and immutable. Its basic building block, the atom, was a model of our equally stable solar system. Planets, solar systems, and galaxies in our large universe were distant and isolated from each other, influenced only by the faint action of the gravity of their remote neighbors. Nothing but empty space existed between them. Nevertheless, they all shared common, universal and homogeneous time. Stability was only marred by the imperceptible yet relentless action of the second law of thermodynamics, which in time will bring an end, not only to all life, but to all of the universe as well, in the form of a ‘heat death.’ Except for a difference in time scale, the fate of the universe is no better than our own.…

[The complete text is available in the printed copy of this issue.]