Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson

Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson or An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man is the first volume of the All and Everything trilogy written by the Greek-Armenia mystic G. I. Gurdjieff. The All and Everything trilogy also includes Meetings with Remarkable Men (first published in 1963) and Life Is Real Only Then, When 'I Am' (first privately printed in 1974). Purpose and significance The book was intended to be the main study tool for Gurdjieff's Fourth Way teachings. As Gurdjieff's idea of "work" is central to those teachings, Gurdjieff went to great lengths in order to increase the effort needed to read and understand it. Gurdjieff himself once said, “I bury the bone so deep that the dogs have to scratch for it." The book covers many topics. It is an allegory and myth in a literary form all its own. In his prospectus for All and Everything, printed at the beginning of each part of the trilogy, Gurdjieff states his aim in the first volume of "destroy[ing], mercilessly, without any compromises whatsoever, in the mentation and feelings of the reader, the beliefs and views, by centuries rooted in him, about everything existing in the world." Beelzebub's Tales is included in Martin Seymour-Smith's 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written, with the comment that it is "...the most convincing fusion of Eastern and Western thought [that] has yet been seen."