Gurdjieff's Okidanokh, Electricity, and the Spiritual Ecology of the Cosmos

In the long, winding cosmological allegory of Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, G.I. Gurdjieff devotes an entire chapter—tellingly titled In the Opinion of Beelzebub, Man’s Extraction of Electricity from Nature and Its Destruction During Its Use, Is One of the Chief Causes of the Shortening of the Life of Man—to an idea that is as startling as it is prescient: that the human exploitation of electrical energy ("electromagnetism") is not merely an environmental or technological matter, but a cosmic and spiritual transgression with consequences extending far beyond our own planet.

Summary

Beelzebub recounts to his grandson Hassein how he came to the “indubitable conviction” that the abnormal existence of Earth’s three-brained beings (humanity) was not only harming themselves, but also disrupting the normal self-perfecting processes of beings on other planets—in this case, the Martians.

This revelation comes through a chain of encounters:

• On Mars, Beelzebub is summoned by the planet’s ruler, the venerable Toof-Nef-Tef, who laments a troubling observation—his people are losing the vitality and mental potency necessary for spiritual development.

  
  

• Toof-Nef-Tef asks Beelzebub to investigate, suspecting some planetary or cosmic disturbance.

  
  

• Later, on Saturn, Beelzebub meets Gornahoor Rakhoorkh, the gifted son of his friend Gornahoor Harharkh. Rakhoorkh has devoted his life to studying the cosmic substance Okidanokh, a universal, omnipresent energy essential to all life and spiritual evolution.

  
  

• Through careful observation and experimentation, Rakhoorkh discovered that his own mental faculties weakened whenever the Martians’ large Lifechakan (a power-generating installation) was in operation.

  
  

• His research revealed that Okidanokh exists in strictly balanced proportions across planetary atmospheres, and when it is depleted in one place, it must flow in from others to maintain cosmic equilibrium.

  
  

• Humanity, in their “naïvely egoistic” use of technology, has learned to extract and destroy large amounts of this sacred substance—what we now call electricity—thereby upsetting the cosmic balance.

  
  

Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub concludes that this reckless extraction is one of the chief causes of the shortening of human life and is also weakening the Martians’ capacity for spiritual perfection.

Significance for Spiritual and Ecological Development

Electricity as a Spiritual Substance

In Gurdjieff’s cosmology, Okidanokh is not simply a form of energy—it is the “omnipresent cosmic-substance” that participates in the arising, maintenance, and self-perfecting of all beings. It is the very medium through which the higher bodies of man—the astral (Kesdjan), mental, and causal bodies—are nourished and matured.

To destroy Okidanokh through careless technological processes is, in Rakhoorkh’s words, “almost equivalent to the conscious destruction of all the labors and results of the First-Sacred-Cause.” Here, Gurdjieff frames a profound ecological ethic: energy is not inert matter to be exploited, but the carrier of divine intentionality.

Interplanetary Consequences of Human Activity

The chapter’s scope is deliberately cosmic. Human activity, however small it may seem in a planetary context, participates in a finely tuned universal economy of energies. The destruction of Okidanokh on Earth necessitates its replenishment from elsewhere—disrupting the atmospheres and inner lives of beings on other worlds.

This vision radically extends the modern ecological concept of “interconnectedness” beyond the biosphere to the entire Megalocosmos (Universe). Humanity is not merely a steward of Earth, but a participant in the maintenance of cosmic homeostasis.

The Moral Dimension of Technology

Gurdjieff is not simply anti-technology; rather, he warns that technology developed without understanding of cosmic law inevitably degrades the very conditions of our spiritual possibility. In the chapter, electricity is a special case: it is the result of “the blending and mutual destruction of two parts of Okidanokh,” and its artificial harnessing for egoistic purposes represents a profound misuse of a sacred gift.

In our own time, this reads as both metaphor and prophecy. The digital-electrical infrastructure that undergirds modern life—servers, grids, networks—is built upon the constant conversion and dissipation of electrical potential. If Gurdjieff’s picture holds, the implications go beyond carbon emissions or climate change: we are bleeding the subtle lifeblood of the planet and cosmos.

Spiritual Ecology and the Shortening of Life

The chapter’s title claims a direct link between this electrical dissipation and the shortening of human life. This may be read in two ways:

• Biologically, as the degradation of environmental and energetic conditions necessary for long-lived organisms.

  
  

• Spiritually, as the reduction of the available Okidanokh needed to form and sustain the higher being-bodies, thereby cutting short the “life” of the soul.

Lessons for Today

Gurdjieff’s account invites a rethinking of how spiritual practitioners relate to energy—not only in the personal sense of vitality and attention, but in the planetary and cosmic sense.

• We are called to conserve and transmute energies consciously rather than dissipate them through mechanical living.

  
  

• The ethics of energy use is not merely environmental policy but a sacrament—a participation in the divine economy of creation.

  
  

• Our technologies must be developed and applied with knowledge of cosmic law, or they will erode the very conditions for conscious evolution.

Conclusion

Chapter 45 is one of the most overtly “ecological” passages in Beelzebub’s Tales, but it is ecology on a scale rarely imagined: the spiritual ecology of the solar system. It is a warning that human misuse of a sacred cosmic energy—electricity—has repercussions far beyond Earth, weakening the very possibility of spiritual attainment for ourselves and for other beings.

In our own era, when the hum of electrical current is the near-constant background to our lives, Gurdjieff’s vision challenges us to see this not as neutral convenience, but as participation in a vast energetic drama, whose stakes are nothing less than the destiny of consciousness in the cosmos.