The Strange Life of P. D. Ouspensky (16 page)

This caused consternation. Ouspensky's pupils had long ago accepted his assertion that Gurdjieff had lost his sense of direction after Essentuki and virtually gone mad - or, at least, gone bad. Contact with American pupils must have confirmed that impression: from the time Orage had formed his group there, Gurdjieff's demands for money had been unremitting; it looked as if he thought of his American disciples as sheep who were there to be fleeced In fact, he seemed to be doing his best to alienate his pupils - in the book
Herald of Coming Good
, he claimed he had founded his Institute for 'purely personal ends'. Pupils deserted in droves - which may have been what he wanted.

The Priory had been sold in 1933, and Gurdjieff had retired to the Grand Hotel in Paris. From 1933 to mid-1935 he had lived in America, where he was hoping to re-establish an institute. But fate seemed against him. D.H. Lawrence's ex-disciple Mabel Dodge Luhan changed her mind about allowing him to set it up at Taos, in New Mexico. Then another disciple, Jean Toomer, tried to arrange a meeting with an American senator, but the senator's plane exploded in mid-air. Gurdjieff even tried to return to Russia, but was turned down by the Soviet authorities. He returned to Paris - via Germany - in the late summer of 1935, and soon had another enthusiastic group around him. In 1936, he moved into 6 rue des Colonels Renard, in the Russian quarter, north of the Etoile. At this period, the old, formidable Gurdjieff, who had reminded an American critic of a riding master or a circus ringmaster, and whom de Salzmann had called a demon, gave way to a gentler and more kindly person. When the war came, Gurdjieff stayed on in Paris, and the occupying Germans seem to have regarded him as a mild and harmless old man.[1]

About half the Lyne group decided to follow Madame Ouspensky's advice, and exactly a year after Ouspensky's death, on 2 October, 1948, Kenneth Walker and his wife Mary arrived in Paris. They arrived at a typically Parisian block of flats with half a dozen other people, including a member of the Lyne group. Gurdjieff's flat reminded Walker of a junk shop, with a remarkable mixture of furniture and a cozy haphazardness. 'Everything seemed to have happened by accident, and nothing by design.' It smelt of Eastern spices. Together with a large crowd, Walker and his wife entered a 'reading room' as oddly furnished as the hall, and for an hour listened to a pupil reading from a typescript of
Beehebub
. Then Gurdjieff slipped quietly into the room - a short, stout man with a sweeping - and greying - moustache and piercing eyes. When Walker looked more closely, he saw that the eyes were friendly. Gurdjieff reminded him of old Chinese paintings of 'the Rogue'. After another hour of reading, Gurdjieff spoke. Rubbing his stomach, he announced that 'le patron' required feeding. They were all invited to lunch.

The huge crowd squeezed into the dining-room, where Gurdjieff was already seated on a divan with one foot tucked under the opposite knee. He proceeded to make a salad for his guests, with cucumber, pickles, red peppers, onions and sour cream. Then glasses were filled with Armagnac or vodka, and a pupil who had been appointed director proposed a toast. Walker (who was basically teetotal) had to take a great swig of vodka.

Gurdjieff he found impressive, with his vast, clean-shaven head and olive complexion. He claimed to be over 80 (although he was, in fact, 71), and he made Walker think of Haroun Al Raschid. Gurdjieff had been involved in another serious car accident earlier that year, but he showed no sign of it. The guests went on to eat pigeons stewed in vine leaves, pilaff, wild strawberries with cream, avocados, Turkish delight and melons. Meanwhile they had to drink endless toasts until Walker found the room expanding and contracting. This was Gurdjieff's method of getting to know people quickly and discovering their 'essence' - if they had any. When it was all over, he invited them all to dinner that evening. Outside, Walker asked Mary what she thought of Gurdjieff.

'He's the most astonishing man I ever met. The chief impression he gave me was of immense vigour and of concentrated strength. I had the feeling that he was not really a man but a magician.' The Walkers went back to the hotel to sleep off the vodka. The evening meal was to be just as lavish, and would go on until after midnight.

Walker reached the interesting conclusion that Gurdjieff was trying to 'loosen up' the London disciples. Too much conscious self-discipline had made them rigid and grim. After Ouspensky, Gurdjieff must have seemed a salutary shock. The more Walker saw of Gurdjieff, the more he experienced a sense of freedom. Gurdjieff seemed to demonstrate by personal example that man's business is to be god-like.

Beelzebub
struck Walker as badly written. But no sooner had he reached the conclusion that Gurdjieff was an unskilled writer than
Meetings with Remarkable Men
forced him to revise his opinion. His attempts to resolve these - and other - contradictions led him to conclude that Gurdjieff
intended
to create conflict and confusion. It was his way of teaching.

The lunches and dinners continued daily until Walker left. When he went to say goodbye, Gurdjieff told him to henceforth regard this flat as his own home, and offered to send him a regular supply of vodka to England. Walker was surprised by the rush of affection he felt as he shook hands.

That year Gurdjieff returned to America once more, and took over Ouspensky's New York group. There he made much the same kind of impact that he made on Walker in Paris - it is described by Irmis B. Popoff in her book
Gurdjieff
- and gave the same kind of vast and interminable meals.

But when Walker saw Gurdjieff in Paris again the following spring, he could see that his health was failing - undoubtedly under the burden of vast quantities of rich food and strong liquor. His breathing was laboured and his lips had a blue tinge. Walker diagnosed fluid in the abdomen and advised an operation to get rid of it. Gurdjieff thanked him, but said he was awaiting the arrival of a new drug from America.

Bennett, who now ran his own teaching group at Combe Springs in Surrey, also spent much time with Gurdjieff in Paris. Gurdjieff's telepathic powers seemed to be unimpaired, and one morning, in a cafe, he dictated to Bennett an advertisement for the forthcoming edition of
Beelzebub
without opening his mouth. On Saturday 22 October, Bennett found him sitting in a café looking ill and tired, but Gurdjieff nevertheless made comments that indicated that he expected to live for at least another five years.

When the American doctor arrived four days later, however, he immediately ordered Gurdjieff to be removed to the American Hospital. His blood pressure was so high that it was impossible to inject serum. The liquid was finally drained from his stomach, but it had been left too late. On 29 October, 1949, Gurdjieff died. The autopsy revealed that he had been keeping himself alive by sheer will-power and vitality; the state of his inner organs was so bad that he should have died years earlier. Gurdjieff was an excellent advertisement for his own belief that a man lives by his powers of concentration.

Seven

Clearly something went wrong - both for Ouspensky and Gurdjieff. Ouspensky drank himself to death; Gurdjieff ate and drank himself to death. And although Gurdjieff's end was less anticlimactic than Ouspensky's, photographs taken during his last years confirm the impression of visitors who came to see him from England and America: that there was a touch of sadness about him.

In the case of Ouspensky, the question of what went wrong is easier to answer. Mystical experiences like the one on the Sea of Marmora confirmed his feeling that man could achieve a higher level of consciousness - that there is something essentially
false
about our everyday consciousness. As a man with training in science and mathematics, he shared the feeling of his contemporaries that man can rise 'on stepping stones of his dead selves to higher things'. His experiments with nitrous oxide seemed to support this. They confirmed beyond all doubt that 'higher consciousness' existed, and could, to some extent, be summoned at will. But Ouspensky's travels in the East were a disappointment; he failed to find what he was looking for.

Then he met Gurdjieff and became convinced that he was a man who 'knew'. And what Gurdjieff had to teach struck Ouspensky as appallingly true. The so-called 'individual' is not one self, but hundreds. His state of consciousness is actually a state of hypnotic sleep. He is virtually a machine. If he wishes to escape these limitations, it must be done by constant self-observation, by self-remembering, and by 'super-effort' or 'intentional suffering'.

It sounds as if all this is an excellent foundation on which to build a deliberate assault on the bastions of higher consciousness. Then what went wrong?

In order to grasp this, we must glance briefly at the history of the quest for 'higher consciousness' in the past two and a half centuries. From the point of view of man's intellectual evolution, the invention of the novel in the mid-eighteenth century is of inestimable importance. Samuel Richardson's
Pamela
(1740), a novel about the attempted seduction of a servant girl, taught men to daydream. Within a year or so, Europe had become 'a nation of readers'. Novels were a magic carpet that carried you away into other people's lives. Vast numbers of men and women - particularly women - who had accepted the boredom of their everyday lives and devoted their spare time to sewing cushion covers, now plunged into the exciting worlds of Rousseau, Goethe, Horace Walpole, 'Monk' Lewis, Mrs Radcliffe - worlds of romance, adultery, seduction and rape.

Goethe, whose novel
The Sorrows of Young Werther
(1771) had been immensely influential (even causing an epidemic of suicides), was also aware of something that earlier writers had scarcely noticed: the beauties of nature. Mountains and forests and lakes became part of the new 'romantic' consciousness. In England, Wordsworth and Coleridge - and then Byron and Shelley - followed his example. Wordsworth had been experiencing 'mystical' states since childhood. So had William Blake. It is in Blake that we can see most clearly the danger of this new romantic consciousness. In The Land of Dreams' the child asks his widowed father:

'Father, O Father! what do we here
'In this land of unbelief and fear?
'The Land of Dreams is better far,
'Above the light of the Morning Star.'

This rejection of the 'real world' and preference for the Land of Dreams is a highly dangerous state of mind, which leads to defeat and despair. And this was the major problem for all those poets, novelists and musicians who wanted their work to reflect the 'higher reality' of the Land of Dreams. They found reality too much for them, and died in droves.

By the end of the century - when Ouspensky was a young man - so many of these 'Outsider' artists had died young or committed suicide or gone mad that it became part of the romantic mythology that if you were a 'sensitive plant' you were virtually inviting an early death. Thomas Mann wrote novels in which death and intellectuality are always linked together, while Hermann Hesse's heroes go in search of 'higher consciousness' only to end by recognizing that it is not to be found in this 'land of unbelief and fear'.

In spite of his scientific temperament, Ouspensky was cast in the mould of a Hesse hero. He made the 'journey to the East' and returned empty-handed. He tried 'experimental mysticism' with the aid of dental gas, but found himself overwhelmed by romantic agony as he had to return to this 'wooden world', grinding on like some creaking mill. Then Gurdjieff held out new hope. Sheer
effort
could keep at bay the moods of romantic despair or the 'triviality of everydayness'. Practising self-remembering, Ouspensky found that he could wander around St Petersburg at night and sense the history of the houses as if they were living beings. He was able to induce moods of self-remembering in which he actually saw other people as sleepwalkers surrounded by their dreams. And on one occasion, he seemed on the point of breaking through to a new level of freedom before someone walked into the room and interrupted him. Gurdjieff's ability to communicate with him telepathically demonstrated that Gurdjieff had achieved certain 'magical' powers. This was also Ouspensky's aim.

What was self-evident was that the human mind has the power to 'hold' far higher levels of vital energy than are called upon in our everyday lives. If we could actually reach a high enough level of vitality and optimism, it would be so powerful that it would effect a kind of alchemical transformation of our inner being, a process of 'fusing'. But every time we begin to approach this level, we 'leak' and allow the energy to escape. Ouspensky could see that if he could learn to close those inner 'valves' that permit the energy to leak away, he could raise himself permanently to a higher level.

But he needed peace and security. Instead, he was uprooted and forced to become a wanderer in foreign lands. It was a traumatic experience for a gentle romantic. Fortunately, fate came to his rescue by making the West aware of
Tertium Organum
. He was welcomed in London; he became a celebrity. The story should now have had a happy ending. Unfortunately, Ouspensky's own temperament was the major obstacle to this. He had drunk deeply of the pessimistic aspects of Gurdjieff s doctrine: human beings are hopelessly self-divided; they are hypnotized sheep waiting for the butcher's knife. There can be no doubt that Ouspensky would have been a happier man if, instead of meeting Gurdjieff, he had met Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian mystic. Steiner would have taught him that the 'spirit world' lies inside us, and that we are all capable of 'access to higher worlds'. In fact, Gurdjieff had on Ouspensky much the same effect that the gloomy Schopenhauer had on Nietzsche: he gave his thinking an overwhelmingly pessimistic tinge. In
The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution
, the first book in which Ouspensky tried to express what he had learned from Gurdjieff, all the emphasis is on human weakness and on man's inability to 'do'.