The Strange Life of P. D. Ouspensky (17 page)

Gurdjieff himself was slightly better off, but not much. He had, in fact, seen the true solution to the problem that had killed off so many romantic Outsiders. The more we feel that the world is a 'land of unbelief and fear' or a 'dim vast vale of tears' or a 'misty dream' the more we are predisposed to run away from it. And this attitude puts us into a state of 'negative feedback': that is, our negative expectations cause us to 'leak', and the leakage confirms our pessimism by making it seem self-evident that life is a bore.

Gurdjieff had discovered that willed effort can close our inner leaks and raise our inner pressure. But in order to truly reverse the negative feedback process, a man would need to be driven by a certain optimism, a sense of what G.K. Chesterton called 'absurd good news'; in other words, he would need to feel that such an effort is worthwhile. But here Gurdjieff's position was closer to that of Ouspensky. He was basically concerned - one might say obsessed - by what is
wrong
with people. His notion of the organ Kundabuffer, implanted in human beings to make them see illusion as reality, was a form of the legend of Original Sin. In his earliest piece of writing,
Herald of Coming Good
, he defines his original purpose as an attempt to prevent in himself the manifestations of 'Tzvarnoharno', something caused by the evil actions of common people, which leads to the destruction of those who would benefit humanity. And
Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson
is an attempt to make people see what is wrong with them. The aim, according to Bennett, is to arouse feeling rather than thought, to create inner conflict that will carry readers beyond their intellectual processes.

Stanley Nott was convinced that this was what was wrong with Ouspensky. He wanted to turn Gurdjieff's teaching into an intellectual system. But Gurdjieff is saying - rather like Bergson - that intellect always misses the point, and that real understanding involves somehow 'shaking the mind awake'.

This is true - as far as it goes. But in trying to shake people out of old habits through inner conflict and 'intentional suffering', Gurdjieff was also missing the point.

The basic point is fairly simple. In those positive moods that Wordsworth describes in the 'Intimations of Immortality' ode, moods when the earth seems 'apparelled in celestial light', we experience an extremely clear and powerful sense that the world is a wonderful and fascinating place, and that we should be extremely grateful to be alive. We can
see
that it is marvellously rich and complex. But in order to perceive this, we need to be in a state of bubbling vitality. And our main problem is that our vitality leaks away too easily, leaving us too tired to appreciate this fascinating complexity - just as it is hard to read philosophy when you are tired.

Abraham Maslow tells a story of a marine who had been in the Pacific without seeing a woman, and, when he returned to base, saw a nurse and instantly had a 'peak experience' - because he suddenly realized with tremendous force that
women are different from men
. This is 'newness' (Browning captures it in his phrase: 'How strange it seems, and new', and Ezra Pound meant the same thing when he called one of his books
Make It New
). Newness is the
recognition of difference
: that what you thought was 'the same' is not the same at all. What a poet sees on a spring morning is 'difference'. But as we grow tired - or discouraged - our senses smooth out the difference into sameness.

In fact this is really the basic problem of human existence. Habit causes us to 'silt up' like a river, until what was once narrow and fast becomes meandering and slow. This is what Wordsworth means when he complains that 'shades of the prison house' begin to close on us as we get older. Wordsworth's early poems - for example, the sonnet on Westminster Bridge - are full of 'newness', while the later poems are somehow 'tired'.

But we have already noted Maslow's important discovery that when he talked to his students about 'peak experiences', they began remembering peak experiences they had previously forgotten about. And as they began talking to one another about peak experiences,
they began having peak experiences all the time
.

The reason is obvious. The peak experience is a perception of difference. You look at some 'familiar' object and see it as new and strange. And you know that this perception is genuine, not some illusion. In fact, Ouspensky had grasped this vital insight in the passage about the factory chimneys in
Tertium Organum
(see p.33).

This is the 'spring morning' feeling. You
see
that everything is much stranger and more complex than your normal perception reveals. And you see that this is so. Like Maslow's marine, you are perceiving a real 'difference'. This is why people who have had peak experiences can go on repeating them: because it is simply a matter of
reminding yourself
of something you have already seen and which you know to be real. In this sense, it is like any other 'recognition' that suddenly dawns on you - for example, the recognition of the greatness of some composer or artist whom you had formerly found difficult or incomprehensible; or the recognition of how to solve a certain problem. Once such a recognition 'dawns', it is easy to re-establish contact with it, because it is there, like some possession, waiting for you to return to it.

Unfortunately, Ouspensky was not in a position to take advantage of this simple 'law of consciousness', because his basic assumptions were negative. So all his emphasis on self-remembering, self-observation, super-effort, was no more effective than his wife's altogether vaguer notions about the importance of religious insights. Whenever he felt tired, he was back to square one. And years of going back to square one finally convinced him that all his insights into human mechanicalness were useless, and that 'the System' had failed him.

He had failed to grasp a simple truth. If you feel tired but optimistic, a short rest will refresh you and re-charge your batteries. If you feel tired and pessimistic, even a sleep may leave you feeling as tired as ever.

Again, consider what happens when something goes wrong, and you put it right. 'Putting it right' has the effect of making you feel delighted that things are 'back to normal', and that 'normality' is a highly desirable state. Yet when things
are
normal, and have been normal for a long time, we take normality for granted; in fact, we may even find it boring. The act of 'putting something right' has the interesting effect of making you see 'normality' as delightful, in fact, it momentarily lifts you into a perception of 'newness', of 'difference', and once again raises you to the perception that reality is infinitely fascinating.

To recognize this is to recognize that our 'normal' perception has a strong pessimistic component, a kind of 'free-floating anxiety', making us aware of the truth of William James's observation that, for much of the time, we 'feel as if a sort of cloud weighed upon us, keeping us below our highest notch in clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding'.

Now this observation occurs in the essay called 'The Energies of Man' which has been discussed earlier in this book, and which makes clear the point that Gurdjieff and James are talking about the same thing: 'second wind' or 'vital reserves'. It is also plain that we can break through to 'second wind' by a deliberate effort of will. James appears to be saying the same thing as Gurdjieff: that we
are
diseased, and that the disease is called Original Sin (or Kundabuffer). But there is an important difference. James recognizes that our negativity is a kind of 'cloud' weighing upon us. James was an optimistic kind of person and, like G.K. Chesterton, he recognized that the basis of reality is 'absurd good news'.

What all this amounts to is the recognition that both Gurdjieff and Ouspensky were inclined to make the same mistake: they over-emphasized the idea of super-effort or intentional suffering. Beyond a certain point, super-effort tends to be counterproductive: it produces fatigue and pessimism.

Consider what happens when you receive some good news, or some anticipated crisis evaporates. There is a sudden perception that the world is delightful. And this
transfers itself to your subconscious mind
, so that even an hour or so later, when you have forgotten about the crisis, you remain in a state of bubbling vitality, as if a kind of 'underfloor lighting' had been switched on. If we could train ourselves to keep the underfloor lighting switched on, our lives would become immensely satisfying and productive.

The odd thing is that every time we experience 'absurd good news', we see that it is an objective fact, and that consequently, there is no earthly reason why, with a little effort, it should not become a permanent state.

Does this mean that no effort is necessary? Clearly not. Our real problem is our inbuilt tendency to 'leak', to allow our inner pressure to sink unnoticed. In
The War Against Sleep
I expressed the problem in the sentence: 'Human beings are like grandfather clocks driven by watchsprings.' But the real trouble is lack of inner pressure - leakage'.

What prevents leakage?
Focusing the attention.
The Zen master Ikkyu was once asked by a workman to write something on his slate; Ikkyu wrote the word 'Attention.' The workman looked disappointed. 'Couldn't you write something else?' Ikkyu wrote: 'Attention, attention.' The workman asked: 'What does attention mean?', and Ikkyu replied: 'Attention means attention.'

He could have replied: 'Attention means focusing your energies and closing your leaks, so you are in a higher energy state.'

Leakage keeps us in a constant state of low inner pressure. But in order to do anything well, you require high inner pressure.

Some personal remarks on my own experience of 'the method' may clarify the point. I came upon Ouspensky's
In Search of the Miraculous
and Kenneth Walker's
Venture with Ideas
in 1951, when I was 20. They filled me with excitement. But at that time, I had already discovered the basic method for the control of consciousness. Like many teenagers, I had suffered a great deal from 'life failure', the feeling that life is meaningless and pointless, and that the efforts it demands of us are a waste of time. For a great deal of the time, my everyday life seemed grey and dull. I craved 'satisfaction', a higher quality of life, yet felt that this was a purely biological craving that did nothing to redeem life from meaninglessness. In fact, life seemed so meaningless that it seemed a waste of time even to kill myself. Eliot's
Hollow Men
seemed to me to express the basic truth about human existence. So did Auden's lines:

Put the car away; when life fails
What's the good of going to Wales?

But in an essay of T.S. Eliot I came upon a reference to the
Bhagavad Gita
, and when I came upon a new translation of it - by Isherwood - in the local bookshop, I bought it.

The
Gita
brought about a total change of attitude. To begin with, it persuaded me to sit cross-legged on the floor, focusing my attention. There were times when I concentrated so hard that I went red in the face. But I suddenly discovered, to my astonishment, that the sense of futility and greyness had vanished. The world suddenly became so interesting that I would often pause to look at a privet leaf, or at a cracked windowsill.

What had happened is obvious. Teenage depression had led to constant 'leakage' and negative feedback. Perception is 'intentional'; in order to perceive anything, you have to throw your attention at it like a javelin. The strength of my throwing arm had become so enfeebled that the javelin was falling at my feet, instead of impaling its object. Reading poetry and listening to music had alleviated the problem, but even if I achieved a state of total affirmation, it had vanished by the following day. Sitting cross-legged and concentrating taught me that it did not have to vanish.

At this point, life suddenly became more complicated. I married and became a father, and that meant I had no time for sitting cross-legged. By the time I came home from the factory, I was exhausted. So I ceased to 'meditate'.

Fortunately, this was the period when I came upon Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.
In Search of the Miraculous
was a tremendous mental stimulus. Reading it required less effort than concentrating, but it could restore that sense of high inner pressure, and restore my sense of purpose. And when, three years later, I wrote my first book.
The Outsider
, it was inevitable that Gurdjieff and Ouspensky should figure prominently.

I had no doubt then - and still have no doubt - that Gurdjieff was perhaps the greatest man of the twentieth century. I became a friend of Kenneth Walker, and what he told me confirmed that impression. Yet I never felt that Walker himself had achieved any high degree of self-discipline. And I continued to feel this in subsequent years when I met followers of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. Bennett struck me as altogether more disciplined, yet oddly narrow. And I found it totally incomprehensible that he had turned from Gurdjieff to Pakh Subuh, and then became a Catholic convert. That seemed to demonstrate once and for all that, in spite of having read
Beelzebub
a dozen times, he still had no idea of what Gurdjieff was talking about. In retrospect, I am inclined to wonder whether, like Ouspensky, Bennett felt that the System had failed him.

Another Ouspensky disciple whom I came to like and admire - and who shall remain nameless - was not even sure of the difference between 'essence' and 'personality'; he thought personality was the 'true self' and essence the 'false self'.

Clearly, then, Gurdjieff had not succeeded in stamping his genius on any of his followers - with the exception of Ouspensky, who already possessed his own genius.

When I came to write
The War Against Sleep
- in 1979 - I tried hard to put my finger on what had gone wrong, particularly in the last chapter, 'Gurdjieff versus Ouspensky?' I saw Ouspensky's problem as his pessimism, and his failure to grasp the 'absurd good news' experience. And I accurately characterized Gurdjieff's problem as his overemphasis on super-effort. Yet although it seems to me that I have clearly stated 'what went wrong', I have not tried hard enough to state how it could have been put right.