"Beelzebub's Tales to his grandson" by George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff

Beelzebub. Who can review Beelzebub? Is there anything that can be said about it that is not refuted on one or another page of the book itself? It is a large book by modern standards, almost 1,300 pages.  And it is intentionally made difficult to read and comprehend.  Some sentences are half a page long with several subjects, objects and digressions in them.  By the time you get to the end of the sentence, that lonely period at the end, one is already struggling to keep the beginning in mind and all the in-between.

Gurdjieff loves to talk pages and pages about one thing, proving its necessity and utter importance, just to dismiss it as garbage 500 pages later.  It is a book that requires critical thinking on every page.  Nothing can be accepted at face value, and yet, there is a lot of face value in the book itself.  Gurdjieff said that he didn't care about ordinary human consciousness, which is an artificial construct with no real value, but that all his books, teachings and methods are meant to go directly into the subconsciousness. 

Beelzebub works unconsciously, without even the reader noticing, bypassing all the censors and gatekeepers "proper" societal upbringing and education has instilled in our human-machines.  It brings perspective, some calm and a lot more understanding, mostly of oneself, and mostly during the frustrations which the book was written to create in the reader.  It is all for the better.  It is all for becoming a better human being, working on oneself.