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

game attitudes" toward women, according to which we unconsciously dividewomen into two categories." 'The first attitude is the one we have toward the woman as the present orfuture mother, and the second, the one we have toward the 'woman-female,'as one might say." 'This characteristic of our Persian men of having data in their nature forthese two distinct "organic attitudes" began to be formed in them onlyrecently, about two and a half centuries ago.'According to the explanations once given to me by my uncle, a mullah,whom everyone called behind his back a "mullah of the old school," it seemsthat, two or three centuries ago, for reasons evidently ensuing from certainhigher world laws, people began making war on each other more intensivelythan usual everywhere on the Earth, especially among us in Asia, while at thesame time in most of the men the feeling of piety very definitely diminishedand in some of them entirely disappeared." 'Just at that period a certain form of psychic disease spread among themen, and many of those afflicted with it either became quite insane orcommitted suicide." 'Then certain wise people of different independent groups on thecontinent of Asia, with the help of various representatives of medicine—which, by the way, was at that time on a much higher level thancontemporary medicine —began very earnestly to search for the causes ofthat new human misfortune." 'After long and impartial labors they discovered, on the one hand, thatthe men who contracted this disease were exclusively those in whosesubconscious, for some reason or other, there no longer arose any impulse offaith in anyone or anything, and on the other hand, that those adult men whoperiodically performed the normal ritual of intercourse with women wereimmune to this disease." 'When the news of this conclusion of theirs spread over