The Strange Life of P. D. Ouspensky (18 page)

Let me try again.

'Peak experiences' involve the sense of 'difference' and 'newness'. Most serious modern literature seems to be based on what I have called the 'fallacy of insignificance', the feeling that intelligent people are bound to be weak and neurotic, and that, as Yeats said, 'We have not begun to live until we have conceived of life as tragedy.' That, in short, 'you can't win'. The peak experience is a sudden overwhelming certainty that you
can
win.

In a book called
Beyond the Occult
, I have suggested that it is helpful to distinguish seven basis levels of human consciousness.

If we regard deep sleep as Level 0, then Level 1 would be dreaming. Level 2 is the level you experience when you wake up in the middle of the night from a deep sleep: a kind of passive, disoriented consciousness. We also experience this when we are very tired, and we look at things without actually 'seeing' them. You could say there is no 'I' present.

Level 3 is the level at which 'I' emerges, but at which you still feel low and dull. I spent much of my teens in Level 3. Shaw called it 'life failure', and Camus 'the absurd'; it is the feeling that reality is quite meaningless in itself, and that
we
impose meanings on it.

Level 4 is our normal, everyday consciousness. And in the lower end of Level 4, life still seems appallingly hard work. Emily Bronte captures it in the poem that begins:

Does the road wind uphill all the way?
Right to the very end.

But about halfway up Level 4, we begin to experience an odd sense of strength and optimism, a feeling that obstacles
can
be overcome and that life can be delightful after all. At the top end of 'everyday consciousness', we feel oddly certain that 'you
can
win'.

Maslow's 'peak experience' - that sudden bubbling feeling of total happiness - might be regarded as a kind of spark that leaps the gap between Levels 4 and 5. Level 5 is what I have called 'spring morning consciousness', the perception of 'newness' and 'difference' the feeling that the world is infinitely fascinating after all.

Such feelings seldom last long. But when they do, they constitute virtually a new level of consciousness - what J.B. Priestley calls 'magic'. A child on Christmas Day may experience 'magic'; so may a couple on honeymoon. According to Yeats, it is the feeling Paris experienced in Helen's arms for the first time: 'What were all the world's alarms?' - a feeling that there is
no
problem that cannot be overcome.

Level 7 is what I have called 'Faculty X' that curious ability we experience in certain moments to grasp the reality of other times and places. Proust experienced it (and described it in
Swann's Way
) when he tasted a small cake dipped in herb tea and suddenly recalled, with tremendous clarity, his childhood in a French village. Arnold Toynbee described the feeling many times in his
Study of History
. In Faculty X, we seem to transcend time. If human beings could achieve Faculty X, their whole lives would become as accessible to them as the past hour.

There is, in fact, a Level 8; Ouspensky experienced it with nitrous oxide. This is 'mystical' consciousness in which we become aware that everything in the universe is connected together.

If we ignore Level 8, and concentrate on the seven levels of ordinary consciousness, we see that our everyday consciousness. Level 4, is precisely halfway up the scale. Moreover, the level at which we begin to feel 'you
can
win' is precisely halfway up Level 4, at 3½. Of course, we may regard the seven levels as completely arbitrary - for example, if we included the so-called hypnogogic states on the verge of sleeping and waking, there could easily be eight levels - yet it is still of practical significance to consider Level 3½ as the 'halfway mark'. For we see that the lower levels are the levels in which we feel that life is futile and meaningless, or tragically difficult. When Sartre says: 'Man is a useless passion' he is merely stating the typical outlook of Level 3.

Up to Level 3½, life is uphill work. But beyond that, it becomes immensely exciting: the peak experience, spring morning consciousness, magic consciousness, Faculty X, mystical consciousness . . . And if we become clearly aware that what keeps us below Level 3½ is simply 'leakage' and the pessimism that comes from negative feedback - the tendency to feel gloomy because we
see
life as gloomy, so that disaster becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy - we can also glimpse a magnificent possibility: that there is no good reason why a few human beings should not 'close their inner valves', maintain a higher level of inner pressure, and remain
permanently
above Level 3½. I have succeeded in doing it for days at a time, and only regret the number of years I have wasted because I was unaware that it could be done.

Now interestingly enough, it is clear that Ouspensky finally became disillusioned with the System because he suddenly recognized this same possibility. When, during his last period at Lyne, he told his pupils that they should have a straightforward, everyday aim, and that only by working alone can one make progress, he was recognizing that a life devoted to the System tends to become as narrow as a life devoted to daily attendance at church. As Walker observed, the London followers had become too rigid and grim. Maslow had also recognized that the people he called 'self-actualizers' have straightforward, everyday aims like other people, but they pour their heart and soul into these everyday aims. A self-actualizer does not have to be a Beethoven or a Michelangelo. It may be a man who takes enormous pleasure in putting ships in bottles or collecting stamps. Maslow cites a woman who was a marvellous mother and who, when she was too old to have more children, adopted children so she could do 'what she was good at'. To do
anything
with this kind of enthusiasm and conviction recharges our vital batteries. Hermann Hesse makes his narrator remark, in
Journey to the East
, 'I, whose calling was only that of a violinist and storyteller, was responsible for the provision of music for our group, and I then discovered how
a long time devoted to small details exalts us and increases our strength
' (my italics). It causes us to make contact with what Granville Barker calls 'the Secret Life', the wellsprings of vitality deep inside us. As we have seen, Maslow even cured a girl suffering from exhaustion and life failure by advising her to go to night school to study a subject that really interested her. As soon as we do anything with enthusiasm, with conviction, with total attention, life takes on a 'real' quality. Our greatest human mistake is to feel that certain things do not
deserve
enthusiastic attention. We have to learn that
anything
done with enthusiastic attention exalts us and increases our strength.

Now in fact, it is relatively easy to recharge our vital batteries. Let me suggest, for example, that if you have been sitting still for some time, reading this book, you bend your arms and tense your shoulder muscles, or simply yawn and stretch. Note the way that this causes a feeling of pleasure to ripple through your muscles. Next, try shutting your eyes very tight as you do it, and twisting up your face into a grimace. Again, you notice that odd 'ripple' of energy and pleasure. In fact, the face muscles play an important part in the control of energy, and this is one of the easiest methods of summoning a minor peak experience.

There are other methods - for example, concentrating intently on a pen help up against the ceiling, making a tremendous effort, then relaxing until you become aware of the whole wall, then concentrating again . . .

Gurdjieff once remarked that there is a vast reservoir of universal energy which is accessible to us, and that with the right kind of effort, we can place ourselves in touch with this energy. Anton Mesmer also believed that there are 'tides' of universal energy that sweep through our bodies, keeping us healthy. (Wilhelm Reich called it 'orgone energy'.) If we become 'blocked', we become unhealthy. But if you concentrate hard, using your face muscles, and bracing your arms, you can experience a sensation of
driving
the energies down through your body. If you continue to do this for a quarter of an hour or so - for example, on a train journey when you have nothing better to do - you begin to experience a curiously 'wide-awake' feeling, and everything you look at seems 'more interesting'.[1] It should be emphasized, in passing, that these exercises can be quite unobtrusive, so that fellow passengers would not even notice.

The most useful time of all, I have found, is the middle of the night, if I happen to be lying awake. It is important to recognize that our usual 'passive' consciousness is not a particularly desirable state, and that counting sheep is not necessarily the best way to utilize the mind. I find that, in the middle of the night, five minutes of 'concentration exercises' begin to produce active pleasure, as I feel the energy being driven down through my body. Sometimes the pleasure is so great that I want to stay awake. But half an hour or so of 'concentration' brings a pleasant tiredness, and I find that I then drift into sleep with a curious sense of happiness. Moreover, once I have achieved this odd sense of control over myself, it becomes possible to 'navigate' one's way into dreams - the phrase is obscure, but it is the best I can do - so that plunging into sleep has a controlled quality, like diving into a pool; there are occasions when the sensation is so pleasant that I enjoy drifting in and out of sleep like someone being swept through the waves on a surfboard. I also observe that, after a night of this kind of sleep, I experience a high level of mental energy, and as I write, am aware that an act of sudden 'attention' can produce a flash of pure delight.

This seems to me to be one of the basic secrets. This deliberate control of energy makes me aware that consciousness was never intended to be passive, and that the solving of problems, which most of us regard as one of the more alarming aspects of life, can and should be a thoroughly enjoyable activity. But we are too passive. We fail to realize that when we experience a 'sinking feeling' of boredom or depression, this has nothing to do with external reality; it is a kind of confidence trick played on us by our 'robot'. It is due, quite simply, to lack of inner pressure, lack of energy. The water has been allowed to sink too low in the well, and it takes a great many strokes on the pump to bring it to the surface. But the act of concentrating, of driving the energies through the body, brings these energies to the surface, and life is suddenly fascinating and meaningful again.

In short, we allow the robot to get away with far too much. That is the essence of Gurdjieff's message.

What seems absurd is that Ouspensky failed to grasp that he was applying his remarkable will-power
in the wrong direction
. He was like a man trying to push open a door that opens the other way. 'Experimental Mysticism' is the fullest description of Level 8 on record. And Ouspensky's central recognition in this state is that
everything in the universe is connected
- which, in turn, is Chesterton's 'absurd good news'. Our 'normal' consciousness divides things. It is like a narrow flashlight beam that plays over objects in a darkened room, but can never illuminate the room as a whole. This means that human beings suffer from a kind of permanent 'tunnel vision', a 'certain blindness'. The most extreme form of this tunnel vision is when we are very tired and depressed (it might be a good idea to substitute the word 'depressurized', for this makes the nature of the problem more obvious), and things around us look somehow meaningless, 'merely themselves'. This is Level 3, what Sartre called 'nausea', and it makes an extraordinary impression of truth and authenticity. Yet it is rather like believing that a picture gallery in the dark has no pictures in it. The moment our inner pressure carries us up to Level 3½, we become aware that we can
choose
between these two views: 'nausea' and meaning.

Our problem is that as soon as we allow ourselves to become 'depressurized' the meaning vanishes and 'nausea' seems to be the only reality. When children experience such states, they are defenceless. Adults, fortunately, have a line of defence: the intellect. Many Victorians had a remarkable grasp of this insight, and Matthew Arnold expressed it in a poem called 'Morality':

We cannot kindle when we will
The fire which in the heart resides.
The spirit bloweth and is still;
In mystery our soul abides;
But tasks in hours of insight willed
Can be through hours of gloom fulfilled.

Once a poet has actually
seen
this meaning he can, with a certain amount of stubbornness and intellectual toughness, hang on to it. It could be compared to navigating in a fog with a compass rather than by the stars.

The man who stands the best chance of fighting his way back into the state of insight is the one who has the best memory for the stars. And a man who has seen the stars a dozen times will obviously have a better memory for them than a man who has only seen them once or twice. And a man who has seen them hundreds of times can never forget them or doubt their existence. This is why we attach such immense importance to these states of 'wider consciousness', and will purchase them at high cost to our health, or even to our lives. The artist or poet who chooses poverty and 'outsiderism' to comfort and security is an example. So is the monk and the yogi. So, unfortunately, is the alcoholic and drug addict and rapist.

Ouspensky's repeated experience of Level 8 - described in 'Experimental Mysticism' - should have provided him with a very good working knowledge of the stars. The recognition that 'everything is connected' is a recognition that there is an 'overall meaning', and that it should therefore be possible for man to achieve it. Ouspensky had an obscure sense that it was somehow wrong to use nitrous oxide to obtain this knowledge, and he was correct. You could say that he had used a balloon to get to heaven when he should have been building a ladder - a ladder of words and concepts - that others could have used after him. Moreover, he had not sufficiently strengthened his sense of reality to be able to cope with the 'landing'. Instead of feeling that everyday reality
contains
all these hidden meanings, these immense vistas of 'connectedness', he could only groan with anguish, like a child who wants Christmas to go on forever. This was the price that he paid for his 'short cut'.