Will Mesa, USA, interviewed by Guy Hoffman
Guy: Okay,
Will, I’m very happy that you came here today to talk with me. I would like to
start out with some of the things I know about you. You were born in Cuba, your
were in the Gurdjieff Work in France and Venezuela, you’re a Professor of
Electrical Engineering, and you are now giving lectures on Beelzebub’s Tales.
Will: Right.
Guy: Why are you giving lectures on
Beelzebub’s Tales?
Will: For me Beelzebub’s Tales has been the way
of salvation for my soul, I would say. Why? Because when I came to the Work in
1975, I went to Paris first, and I joined a group of Henri Tracol. I spent three
years over there, and then I went back to Venezuela.
By that time I had
already read Beelzebub two times; once in English, and once in French when I was
in Paris; and then when I went back to Venezuela, I worked on the translation
from French to Spanish. So by that time my aim and purpose in life had
completely changed. It went from Ouspensky and the Work as it is taught in
groups to the study of Beelzebub.
Guy: Let’s go back a little bit.
How did you first get started in the Work?
Will: Okay. I was
talking to a friend at the university in Venezuela where I was teaching. It’s
very funny because I was talking to him about book on alchemy. Suddenly he
stopped me and said: no, no, forget about that, it doesn’t work. What you have
to do is have a sensation of your arm. And then he touched my right arm. And he
said: sense it; feel it. I began to do it and I immediately realized I had no
answer for him, no intellectual answer.
Guy: I’m not sure I
understand, you had no answer to …
Will: To the conversation. The
conversation started on alchemy. It was an intellectual conversation. After
sensing my arm, he disarmed me because I was an intellectual.
Guy:
(laughing) Right
Will: I said to him: where did you get this
from? He said: This is the teaching of Gurdjieff. He was in a group, and I found
out later it was a very crazy group. So I asked him for some books. It so
happened that the owner of the bookstore was a Russian woman and she was with
Gurdjieff in Paris. She gave me, and I don’t know why, the worst book of
Gurdjieff to read. The book was Monsieur Gurdjieff by Louis
Pauwels.
Guy: Oh, right, right, I know the
book.
Will: It’s the most negative book
Guy: It’s
true.(laughing)
Will: But that’s the book that I
needed.
Guy: (laughing)
Will: Because the more I
read the book the more I like Gurdjieff
Guy:
(laughing)
Will: Because he was so negative.
Guy:
(laughing)
Will: You know you approach spirituality by two ways;
by the saint or by the devil. I went by the devil.
Guy:
(hysterical laughter)
Will: She knew I was that kind of person so
she gave me the right book. When I came back to the bookstore, she gave me
Ouspensky. By the time I finished reading Ouspensky, I made up my mind to go to
Paris and find one of the disciples of Gurdjieff. I was very lucky to find a
group, because in l975 it wasn’t easy. I was taking a French course at the
university and there was this young English lady there, and she asked me what I
was doing in Paris, and I said I’m looking for a Gurdjieff group.
Will
& Guy: (laughing)
Will: And she said, no kidding; my best
friend is from Peru and he has been in a group for twenty years. And now she put
me in touch with this guy. I call him up on the phone and he says let’s get
together at the biggest mosque in Paris. He was Muslim; he changed from
Christianity. I never met any guy who so resembled Gurdjieff . In fact, at that
time they were making the movie Meetings with Remarkable Men and they considered
him for the role of Gurdjieff. So when I saw him in the mosque—he had, what do
you call it? uh, that Turkish hat, I said to myself: what the hell is going on
here? Is this Gurdjieff himself?
Guy:
(laughing)
Will: He was a senior member of the Henri Tracol group.
A month later I was in the group.
Guy: How long were you in the
group?
Will: Three years.
Guy: What did you learn
there?
Will: The thing that I learned, and again I always go back
to this, is that they were not reading Beelzebub. We met every Saturday to read
Ouspensky.
Guy: Why do you think they should have been reading
Beelzebub instead of Ouspensky?
Will: I always thought Ouspensky
was the intellectual opening to the teaching, but Beelzebub was the book by
Gurdjieff. Why not read it? That was always my question.
I once asked Tracol
why are we not reading Beelzebub and what were his thoughts on the book. He said
there is only one chapter in the book that is important and that is The Terror
of the Situation.
Guy: You’re kidding.
Will: No. And
when I went back to Venezuela and joined the group of Nathalie Etievan, the
daughter of Mme. de Salzmann, I found the same thing. I asked them why they were
not reading Beelzebub. The answer I got was it’s a “jig saw,” nobody can
understand it. Another said, “it’s the Bible, but we don’t read it.” If it’s the
Bible, why don’t you read it? By l982, a friend of mine at the college who was a
member of a Gnostic group knew I was reading Beelzebub. At that time I was
through my third reading, this time in Spanish. He said, why don’t you come to
our group and give six lectures on Beelzebub. At the first lecture there was
only about twelve people. By the sixth lecture there was no room for people. So
I ask myself, how come these people …
Guy:
(laughing)
Will: are so interested in Beelzebub and the people in
the Work don’t care about it. So I decided to make a change. I wanted to bring
my family to New York. I didn’t even care about asking about the Foundation in
New York because I knew they were doing the same thing.
Guy: So
what did Beelzebub do for you, I mean …
Will: First, it gave me
answers to questions I was searching for that I could not find in Ouspensky. In
Search of the Miraculous, as we know, is a very intellectual book; it gives you
a lot of information. But Beelzebub has the magic of touching you emotionally;
your higher emotional center. And since I’m a person who really likes to
laugh…the first time I read it I laughed so much … you know, I really fell in
love with the book.
Guy: That’s good. That’s
good.
Will: I really fell in love with the
book.
Guy: Now, can you go back to your childhood. Was there
anything you can relate to that would have some bearing on your interest in
Beelzebub?
Will: I was born in a small town in Cuba. I remember
all kids on the block got together with an old man who was always telling us
tales. And my favorite two books were Don Quixote and Arabian Nights. I was
always interested in tales. The thing that shocked me when I read Beelzebub and
began to understand, and this related to my childhood, is …
you know in the
book there are three catastrophes to the planet. One is the comet Kondoor
striking Eartth, the other is the sinking of Atlantis, and the other is the
dispersing of the races. I began to see that these same catastrophes happen in
our life. We, as Beings of the planet Earth, repeat in ourselves the
catastrophes of the planet, only on a smaller scale. When I began to understand
that, I searched in my mind to see what were the three catastrophes in my life.
It didn’t take me too much time see that the comet hit me when I was ten years
old; my mother died. The death of my mother was the breaking up of my being,
like the Earth breaking into fragments after being struck by Kondoor. It was
devastating for me; I was put in an orphanage. Now when I was seventeen I began
to do things against my father that was not proper. You might call it a sin.
Maybe it was because he put me in the orphanage. Later when I was going through
these three catastrophes of my life, I thought of it as the sinking of Atlantis.
Because what is the sinking of Atlantis? It is the sinking of conscience into
the depth of our being. That’s what it represents in Beelzebub, the sinking of
the divine impulse of objective conscience. After that everything began to get
abnormal. Later I had the opportunity to work on that because I had to take care
of my father when he was suffering from Alzheimer’s. That was a good way of
freeing myself from for the sins I did against him. And then when I was
twenty-eight years old I had the third catastrophe in my life. I was working on
my doctoral dissertation and I had a terrible nervous breakdown to the point
that I was taken to the hospital for a whole week where all the crazy people
were, and people on drugs. But the experience was good. You see, one of the
things about the third catastrophe is that the three great civilizations
separated, I mean Tikliamish, Maralpleicie, and Pearl-Land. So the analogy here
is that your three centers, each one of them represents a civilization, are
separated from each other. Well that’s exactly what happened to me at that time.
My three centers were all going their own way. I experience that for one week.
Later I had to work to put myself back together.
Guy:
(laughing)
Will: There is in the book an explanation of our own
life. This idea of making a connection between our life and the Tales is for me
the way to approach the book. This is now, but ten, fifteen years ago it was
more intellectual.
Guy: Besides Beelzebub, did the Work help you
in your life?
Will: Yes, the exercises of having a sensation of my
body and the Movements. For an intellectual like me, the Movements were very
good. If you only read Ouspensky and do nothing else, it just becomes an
intellectual exercise.
Guy: Where do you think the Gurdjieff Work
is going to now?
Will: In Beelzebub, there are two currents; two
rivers. One group, I think, is going to continue in the traditional group
meetings with the movements and all that. There is now another group that is now
being formed around the world that is into Beelzebub. Just three days ago, I was
in a discussion group from the All & Everything conference. I said in one of
my emails that the teacher is now Mr. Beelzebub; it’s not only Mr. Gurdjieff,
it’s Mr. Beelzebub. I can quote Gurdjieff saying the same thing. When they asked
him about his book, he said, “That’s not my book; it Mr. Beelzebub’s
book.”
Read also Will Mesas article called "An
Experiment Extracted from Beelzebub's Tales".
Will Mesa lectures in
New York on Beelzebub's Tales.