The Slugs provides an overview, explanation and interpretation of G. I. Gurdjieff's masterpiece Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, undoubtedly one of the most profound and mysterious books of the sacred literature in the modern world. The framework of ideas, claims and objective science offers a fundamentally alternative view of the nature of life, the origins and history of the Solar System and humankind, the nature of the human psyche and psychopathology, and a science of the soul. In the light of The Tales, most of modern thought and philosophy is so much 'pouring-from-the-empty-into-the-void.' The 'sorry scientists' of 'new format' have no conception of the great inscrutable mysteries of Nature and the subtle inner dimensions and alchemy of human beings. Beelzebub's Tales is a work not only of myth, allegory, history and fantasy, but about the secrets of 'objective science' and the psychology of the soul. Gurdjieff's masterful Tales also provides a shocking portrait of the "strangeness of the human psyche" and explains how humans' essential consciousness and the divine impulses of faith, hope and love, passed into the 'subconsciousness, ' while a 'false consciousness system' replaced it, crystallized around their egoism and associated unbecoming being-impulses. Beelzebub as a cosmic figure of higher reason observes the horrific "processes of reciprocal destruction," or war as periodically occurs on Earth, and asks how such phenomenal depravities come about and why humans cannot eradicate such an arch-criminal particularity in their psyche. The strange three-brained beings perceive reality "topsy-turvy," are mechanized to "see nothing real" and squander their sacred sexual substances solely for pleasure and their multiform vices. Beelzebub's portrayal of the "Hasnamusses," individuals who lack the Divine being-impulse of 'conscience, ' the 'intelligentsia' and the 'crats, ' provides vivid images of the psychopathology of the world's so-called 'elites' with their special societies or "criminal gangs," their "international five o'clocks" and "Hasnamussian sciences." The future of humanity is bleak indeed without the guidance of a being of such a higher intelligence as Beelzebub himself. The Slugs, like Gurdjieff's Tales, provides searing and illuminating insights into human psychopathology, the cause of war and the horror of it all.

The central illusion is that we "know self." People think that they possess capacities which in reality they do not. Primary illusions concern the faculties of consciousness, the unity of I, the possession of will (the capacity to do) and the existence of the soul. The fourth way psychology begins with a study of humans as they are under the conditions of mechanical life and describes the psychology of man's possible evolution. Humans can awaken, experience higher states of consciousness, achieve a unity of "I" and will, and attain the soul. If we understand our illusions, then there is a chance of escape, of awakening and evolution. According to Beelzebub, the central character in G.'s Tales, the three-brained beings on planet Earth are microcosmoses or "similitudes of the Whole." As such, they have the possibility of not only serving local cosmic purposes, feeding the earth and moon as part of organic life on earth, but of experiencing sacred being-impulses, attaining levels of objective reason and individuality and even of "blending again with the infinite." (1950) A human being can potentially coat higher being-bodies for the life of the soul, instinctually sense cosmic truths and phenomena, and maintain existence within the subtle realms of being after death-achieving different levels of immortality. Unfortunately, humankind came to exist only in waking sleep states of automated consciousness, perceiving reality topsy-turvy, conditioned by pleasure and self love, and wasteful of their sacred sexual substances. Human beings no longer realize their deeper cosmic purposes and possibilities, or attain real "I." Psychological Illusions explores the psychology, metaphysics and cosmology of the fourth way teaching. This includes material on the Ray of Creation, the fundamental cosmic laws, the alchemical crystallization of higher being-bodies and the miraculous possibilities existing for the evolution of the individual human being.