Gurdjieff, on Organic Shame
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"And about these 'very ancient' communities—'ancient,' that is, from the point of view of your contemporary favorites—I must tell you and possibly even in detail, for not only did they make a 'clean sweep' from the face of that unfortunate planet of the last results that might have been beneficial for the three-brained beings of all subsequent epochs, and even of all trace of the memory of the very saintly labors of the Essence-Loving Ashiata Shiemash, but also they were the cause of the utter nonsense that proceeds in the Reason of your contemporary favorites, and of the complete atrophy in them of that 'fundamental being-impulse,' the main lever of objective morality, called 'organic shame.' —p. 378-79
"Here it is very interesting to note that, although the heritage from the ancient Romans has caused the gradual disappearance from the presence of your favorites of the 'organic shame' proper to three-brained beings, there has arisen in its place something rather like it In the presence of your contemporary favorites there is as much as you want of this 'pseudo being-impulse,' which they also call 'shame,' but the data for engendering it are quite singular. —p. 388
"It is even astonishing that most of the beings of the community of France, in spite of the quite abnormal conditions of ordinary being-existence, due to their capital having unfortunately become the chief 'center of culture' for the whole of that ill-fated planet, were able to preserve in their presences, however unconsciously, those data for the two being-impulses on which, above all, objective morality is based, and which are called 'patriarchality' or 'love of family,' and 'organic shame.' —p. 638
"In spite of all the obvious advantages of preserving products in such vessels, certain beings with good sense, existing in the country of Maralpleicie, observed that, in beings who habitually used products preserved in this way, what is called 'organic shame' was progressively atrophied, so, as soon as they had succeeded in spreading the information about this discovery of theirs, all the beings around them ceased to employ this method, and eventually it was dropped so completely from common use that the knowledge that such a method had ever existed failed to reach even the fifth or sixth generation after them. —p. 883
Excerpts from Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson by G. I. Gurdjieff Penguin Group, 2006
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