Beelzebubs-Tales-to-His-Grandson-by-G-I-Gurdjieff

"They have named the totality and the separate parts of this substance,sacred for them also, differently at different periods, and at the present timethey name the result of the blending and reciprocal destruction of two parts ofthis omnipresent substance 'electricity. '"And indeed, although several times in earlier epochs they had alreadydiscovered—of course, thanks always to an accidental chain ofcircumstances—various means of extracting from the nature of their planet,and using for their various, as I have called them, 'naively egoistic aims,' theseparate parts of this omnipresent substance, absolutely necessary for normalcosmic processes, yet never have they destroyed so much of it as in recenttimes"So, in this way, thanks to the explanations of my 'external kesdjanianresult,' I became absolutely convinced of the maleficent action, already begun,of the results of the abnormal ordinary being-existence of the three-brainedbeings who have taken your fancy, and furthermore, the question disturbingmy old friend resolved itself, namely, why during recent times it had becomemore and more difficult for the three-brained beings of the planet Mars toperfect themselves."As for the manner in which this question was resolved, I might say that ithappened just as described, in reference to similar cases, in a rarely quotedsaying of our esteemed Mullah Nasr Eddin:'You never know who will help you to get out of a galosh.'"In fact, for the resolution of this question, my old friend had in mindIndividuals with quite other data and possibilities than those of my friends onSaturn, who were simply ordinary three-brained beings He probably did notsuspect that as regards such questions, these ordinary three-brained beings,who acquire information about all sorts of real cosmic facts thanks only totheir 'being-partkdolgduty,' are