The Strange Life of P. D. Ouspensky (5 page)

Tertium Organum
ends with a chapter about mysticism, dealing with the phenomenon that R.M. Bucke called 'cosmic consciousness'. This, Ouspensky recognizes, is what the human race is evolving towards. He quotes the mystic Edward Carpenter:

Men will not worry about death or a future, about the kingdom of heaven, about what may come with and after the cessation of life of the present body. Each soul will feel and know itself to be immortal, will feel and know that the entire universe with all its good and all its beauty is for it and belongs to it forever. The world peopled by men possessing cosmic consciousness will be as far removed from the world of today as this is from the world before the advent of self-consciousness.

This is a fundamentally Nietzschean view; it springs out of Zarathustra's recognition that the most basic answer lies in 'great health' - which, in turn, depends on
stopping ourselves from leaking
.

This is why Gurdjieff told Ouspensky that if he understood everything in his own book, he would be a great teacher.

Ouspensky's problem was that he had not yet grasped everything in his own book. He had, without knowing it, solved the basic problem of Ivan Osokin: the weakness, the self-pity, the Tchaikovskian melancholy. The basic solution lay in recognizing that they were analogous to the snail's perception of the sunlight, the darkness and the rain. Once the snail has learned that the limits of its shell are not the limits of the universe, it has also taken the most important step towards perceiving that universe as it really is, rather than as a stifling, trivial, petty, personal illusion.

These insights had thrown Ouspensky's mind into a ferment. He saw threads stretching out from his central idea to all kinds of apparently contradictory notions: Nietzsche's Superman, the message of the New Testament, yoga, the symbolism of the Tarot, dreams and hypnosis, the ideas of Einstein, Eternal Recurrence, mysticism, the importance of sex in the evolutionary scheme . . . The next task was to begin to get this explosion of insights and connections down on paper. And so, even before setting out for his trip to Egypt, India and Ceylon, he had started to write the book that would become
A New Model of the Universe
, a work that would contain the most important essay he ever wrote: the chapter called 'Experimental Mysticism'. He was still engaged upon this book when he met Gurdjieff.

Now we can begin to see why, in a certain sense, the meeting with Gurdjieff was Ouspensky's greatest personal disaster. He had already found his own answer, even if he did not know that he knew it. All he had to do was to pursue it, to think about it repeatedly until he had plumbed it to its depths. And at this point he met the man whose philosophy hurled him back into the pessimism of 10 years earlier. For Gurdjieff, man is a machine, a helpless puppet in the hands of fate. Eight years later, a young English doctor named Kenneth Walker would attend a talk by Ouspensky in a dreary room in Kensington, and would record Ouspensky's first words: that man likes to believe that he possesses a real and permanent 'I', whereas in fact he possesses dozens of 'I's', all struggling for possession; he is virtually a 'multiple personality'.

A man also prides himself on being self-conscious, where as even a short course of self-study will reveal the fact that one is very rarely aware of oneself, and then only fora few fleeting moments. Man believes that he has will, that he can 'do', but this is also untrue. Everything happens in us in the same way that changes in the weather happen. Just as it rains, it snows, it clears up and is fine, so also, within us, it likes or it does not like, it is pleased or it is distressed. We are machines set in motion by external influences, by impressions reaching us from the outside world.

There is a simple objection to this: it is untrue. That is to say, it carries an accurate observation to a point at which it becomes untrue. The real trouble is that we allow our intellect and senses to operate
in vacuo
, and not in association with our vital forces, our sense of 'urgency'.

Now if Ouspensky had been as pessimistic as he sounds, he would not have been giving a lecture. His whole point - and Gurdjieff's - is that recognition of man's lack of freedom is the first step towards
achieving
some kind of freedom. Man must do this by struggle, by 'work on himself', by self-observation. The problem for Ouspensky's listeners, as Walker and a dozen others have made clear, is that his gloomy outlook communicated itself to his audience, producing the opposite effect to that he would have produced if he had spent the evening talking to them about the ideas of
Tertium Organum
. Walker notes that the room, with its uncomfortable chairs, reminded him of the Presbyterian churches of his Scottish childhood, and of the congregation awaiting the arrival of the minister - who would tell them they were all damned. This, in effect, is what Ouspensky was doing. This is what Gurdjieff did to Ouspensky.

The objection to Ouspensky's view can be stated simply. The basic problem for human beings is to break through to higher levels of energy, to what William James called - in an important essay - 'Vital Reserves'. James started from the recognition that there are certain days on which we feel more alive than on others. Much of the time, 'most of us feel as if a sort of cloud weighed upon us . . .
Compared to what we ought to be we are only half awake.
' James recognized that we are, at least, half awake, not fast asleep:

In some persons this sense of being cut off from their rightful resources is extreme, and we then get the formidable neurasthenic and psychasthenic conditions, with life grown into one tissue of impossibilities, that so many medical books describe.

Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energises below his
maximum
, and he behaves below his
optimum
. In elementary faculty, in coordination, in power of
inhibition
and control, in every conceivable way, his life is contracted like the field of vision of an hysteric subject - but with less excuse, for the poor hysteric is diseased, while in the rest of us, it is only an inveterate
habit -
the habit of inferiority to our full self - that is bad.

He goes on to ask how unusual men manage to escape these limitations, and answers - exactly as Gurdjieff answered:

Either some unusual stimulus fills them with emotional excitement, or some unusual idea of necessity induces them to make an extra effort of will.
Excitements, ideas, and efforts
, in a word, are what carry them over the dam.

He goes on to make an observation that was also the basis of Gurdjieff's 'Work':

In these 'hyperaesthetic' conditions which chronic invalidism so often brings in its train, the dam has changed its normal place. The slightest functional exercise gives a distress which the patient yields to and stops. In such cases of 'habit-neurosis' a new range of power often comes in consequence of the 'bullying-treatment,' of efforts which the doctor obliges the patient, much against his will, to make. First comes the very extremity of distress, then follows unexpected relief.

Gurdjieff's basic method was to combat 'habit-neurosis' through a version of the 'bullying treatment' - by forcing his followers to make efforts that brought 'the very extremity of distress', followed by a sudden sense of freedom, as if a strait-jacket had been loosened.

William James had arrived at these conclusions through unpleasant personal experience. In
The Varieties of Religious Experience
, he describes how, at the age of 28, he fell into a state of general pessimism about his prospects:

I went one evening into a dressing-room in the twilight to procure some article that was there; when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up under his chin, and the coarse grey undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them inclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other.
That shape am I
, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I became a mass of quivering fear. After this the universe was changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a general sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before, and that I have never felt since. It was like a revelation; and although the immediate feelings passed away, the experience has made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since. It gradually faded, but for months I was unable to go into the dark alone.

In general I dreaded to be left alone. I remember wondering how other people could live, how I myself had ever lived, so unconscious of that pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life. My mother in particular, a very cheerful person, seemed to me a perfect paradox in her unconsciousness of danger, which you may well believe I was very careful not to disturb by revealing my own state of mind.

James's problem was that he had, like the neurasthenic patients, fallen into a state of gloom in which life had 'grown into one tissue of impossibilities', an endless series of hurdles that he lacked the strength to tackle. This sense of helplessness, of will-lessness, had sapped his 'vital reserves' until, so to speak, his inner-resistance gave way - plunging him into a state in which
nothing seemed worth the effort -
hence the sudden identification with the green-faced patient.

He describes how he succeeded in emerging very slowly from this slough of despond when he came upon a definition of free will by the French philosopher Charles Renouvier: 'the sustaining of a thought
because I choose to
when I might have other thoughts'. Renouvier had commented that we may feel that all our actions are mechanical, an automatic response to stimuli, until we consider the fact that
we can think one thing rather than another
. I can
decide
what to think; I can switch my train of thought from one track to another, and back at will to the first track. I can summon up images of rain, of snow, of July sunshine, of autumn gales, all merely by willing it.

The moment James saw that Renouvier was correct, he began to emerge from his hopeless gloom, and he struggled his way back to the state of intense creative activity in which he wrote his classic
Principles of Psychology
.

It is clear that this
intellectual conviction
that he possessed free will made all the difference between sickness and health. If he had continued to believe himself a machine, he would have continued to be undermined by misery and self-doubt. It follows that if James had met Gurdjieff at that fateful point in his life, and accepted his view that we possess virtually no free will, he might never have made a complete recovery from his neurasthenia.So it becomes possible to see what went wrong for Ouspensky after his meeting with Gurdjieff. When he had finished
Tertium Organum
in 1911, he had an excited sense of being on the verge of discovering
the
answer. It was obviously very close, and something to do with maintaining a high level of excitement and 'eagerness'. His friend who could see 'difference' all the time was obviously near to it.

And at this crucial point, Gurdjieff explained to him that the first thing he must understand was that
he could do nothing
, plunging him back into something like William James's state of inner paralysis. Ouspensky must have known this was nonsense. By pursuing his goal in his own way, he had achieved a great deal. What he needed now was to maintain that high level of drive and optimism that had inspired
Tertium Organum
, and that was now inspiring
A New Model of the Universe
. But Gurdjieff was an impressive teacher. He seemed to know all the answers.

To begin with, there was self-remembering. This was an exercise that involved looking at an object, and making an effort to be aware of
yourself looking at it
. Anyone can see how difficult this is. Close your eyes and become aware of yourself. Now open them and look at your watch. Instantly, you cease to be aware of yourself and become aware of your watch. 'You' disappear. With a considerable effort you can reawaken awareness of yourself as you look at your watch, but if you are not careful, you then 'forget' your watch and become aware only of yourself. (On the other hand, if you concentrate your attention while reading this book, you will note that you become aware of yourself as well as of the book.)

Ouspensky recognized that all moments of happiness are moments of self-remembering. What happened on the Sea of Marmora was a flash of self-remembering. What happened when he sensed the
difference
between the factory chimneys and the prison walls was self-remembering. We often experience self-remembering when setting out on a journey. But if we think about this for a moment we see the reason why. Because we feel relaxed, and we are
looking forward
to what is to come, we experience a feeling of
eager expectation
, the feeling that the world is a fascinating and delightful place. The same thing happens if we experience sudden relief when we had been expecting something unpleasant to happen - like a man being reprieved from a firing squad. The answer lies in that surge of optimism.