The Strange Life of P. D. Ouspensky (3 page)

In the second of the
Talks with a Devil
, the story called 'The Benevolent Devil', Ouspensky develops ideas that are strikingly similar to Shaw's. He describes a visit to the caves of Ellora, in Northeast Bombay state, which is followed by a dream in which he meets the Devil (now spelt with a capital D) in the temple of Kailas, and they resume the conversation that was broken off in the previous story.

The Devil begins by explaining that, as far as he is concerned, 'this' world is the only reality, and there is nothing beyond it. 'The kingdom of matter is eternal.' Then he explains that there are two kinds of human beings: one, the descendants of animals, who live entirely on the material plane, and 'whose lives consist of harbouring grudges and trying to get out of difficulties by burdening others with them', and two, the descendants of Adam and Eve, who suffer from 'religious mania', and believe in absurd ideals. He goes on to explain how he seduced Adam and Eve into materialism by giving them large quantities of a delicious fruit which they liked so much that they began to eat it three times a day. They became so obsessed by this fruit that they forgot all their 'imaginary ideals'. Then they began to quarrel, and when Eve left Adam, he found himself three wives from a nearby tribe, while Eve took a lover. And so the Fall began . . .

Unfortunately, the descendants of Adam and Eve have never lost their vision of the imaginary ideal and it takes a whole army of devils to prevent them from backsliding into virtue.

The Devil now tells the story of a young man called Leslie White, to whom Ouspensky has introduced a Sinhalese yogi. After a long talk with the yogi, Leslie decides to forgo his dinner - he is not really hungry anyway - and to spend the evening reading some books that have arrived that morning. Watched anxiously by his personal little demon, Leslie settles down in an armchair with a weak whisky and soda. As soon as he becomes absorbed in the world of the books, the demon loses sight of him; Leslie seems to vanish into thin air. This, Ouspensky realizes, is because 'his whole being was immersed in the world of ideas, and material reality did not exist for him'.

So that is the secret, I thought. To get away from reality means to get away from the devil, to become invisible to him. This . . . signifies, in reverse, that people of dull reality, practical, workaday people, in general all ordinary sober people, belong absolutely and completely to the devil . . . To be frank, I was delighted by this discovery.

Love, it seems, is another way in which the demon can 'lose' his prey, for when a person is romantically in love, the feeling surrounds him like a wall, and he becomes invisible . . .

The demon servant now begins trying to seduce Leslie back to laziness and self-indulgence. To dull his senses, he puts him out an unusually large and tasty breakfast. Leslie is unable to resist it and his sense of latent possibilities collapses . . .

Later that day he goes to tea at the house of Lady Gerald, and there he sees, for the second time, a girl called Margaret, to whom he is powerfully attracted. She obviously feels the same. He begins to tell her about the old yogi and she understands him.

Leslie suddenly understood that if he could take the two steps which separated him from Margaret and then take her by the waist and lead her right down to the sea, walk with her along the waters edge, feel it roll under their feet, further and further on, until the stars began to shine, somewhere where there were no people, but only the two of them, then straight away everything that the old Indian had spoken about would become a complete reality.

But the moment passes - and as it does so, Leslie has an overwhelming sense that this has all happened before, and that he has lost Margaret before in the same way.

On his way home, he daydreams about her, and again the demon feels he is losing him. So he sends someone to invite him to dinner, and then makes sure that he overeats. (The demon can even turn himself into particularly delicious-looking dishes.) Finally, although tempted to stay awake and think out his problems, Leslie has a whisky and soda, and falls asleep. The demon looks utterly exhausted.

'You see,' said the Devil, 'that is what our life is like. Is that not self-sacrifice? Think of it: the poor little devil must keep watch over every step he takes, not leaving him even for one moment. He allows himself to be eaten up, works himself into such a state, and there is still the risk of losing him because of his various silly fantasies . . .'

And it seems that Leslie is, in fact, lost to his demon. The words of the yogi have awakened him, and he goes into a Buddhist monastery and begins to practise fasting and meditation. 'But,' says the Devil, 'I have not lost him yet. I still have one trick up my sleeve. The stake is on nobility . . .'

Ouspensky learns what he means when he sees Leslie again in London, two months after the outbreak of the First World War. He is marching alongside his platoon, on his way to fight. The stake is on nobility . . .' War, in which the descendants of Adam and Eve fight one another and believe it is all for the sake of the highest ideals, is the Devil's ultimate seduction . . . This time the Devil has won.

Together with
Ivan Osokin
, these two
Talks with a Devil
afford a fundamental insight into Ouspensky's vision of human existence. It is at once romantic and pessimistic. The world is divided into black and white: the children of Adam and the descendants of the beasts, who belong to the Devil. Daydreaming enables us to escape from the Devil. So does falling in love. But the Devil usually has an extra trick up his sleeve, and man's chances of evolving are very slim indeed. It never seems to strike Ouspensky that daydreaming, and the kind of lassitude and pessimism that can spring from it, are as harmful in their way as the Devil's materialism. They encourage man to sit on the sidelines and sneer at the peacemakers while escaping into a world of romantic imaginings. They encourage him to believe that the answer lies in finding an ideal woman, or in finding a Teacher who can initiate him into the Great Secret. In short, they encourage him to look everywhere for the answer but inside himself . . .

Yet all this is not entirely fair to Ouspensky. For by 1914 - when he was on the eve of meeting his long-awaited Teacher - he had already taken some major steps towards solving the problems that tormented Ivan Osokin. In fact, in some respects he had even gone further than his Teacher.

Two

Ouspensky sailed from London, and arrived back in a St Petersburg whose name had been changed to Petrograd (because in the frenzy of World War One patriotism, St Petersburg sounded too German).

Back in his newspaper office in Moscow, he saw a notice for a ballet called
The Struggle of the Magicians
, which declared that the action took place in India and would give a complete picture of Oriental magic. Ouspensky published it in his column, with the sarcastic comment that it would contain everything that cannot be found in the real India. After that, he went to Petrograd, where he delivered two highly successful lectures about his travels in the East, both of which attracted audiences of more than a thousand.

It was when he repeated the same lectures in Moscow that two new acquaintances - a musician and a sculptor - told him about a teacher called Gurdjieff, a Caucasian Greek who was also the author of the ballet about India. It seemed that Gurdjieff possessed remarkable hypnotic powers. Ouspensky was sceptical: 'People invent miracles for themselves, and invent exactly what is expected from them.' Nevertheless, he eventually agreed to meet Gurdjieff.

We arrived in a small café in a noisy though not central street. I saw a man of an oriental type, no longer young, with a black moustache and piercing eyes, who astonished me first of all because he seemed to be . . . completely out of keeping with the place and its atmosphere . . . this man, with the face of an Indian rajah or an Arab sheik, whom I at once seemed to see in a white burnoose or a gilded turban . . . produced the . . . impression of a man poorly disguised.

Gurdjieff spoke with a strong Caucasian accent, which would have sounded rather provincial to Ouspensky.

And what did Gurdjieff see? Ouspensky was a man of medium height, with closely cropped hair, a prim mouth, and eyes that peered short-sightedly through thick pince-nez glasses. Another disciple of Gurdjieff, the musician Thomas de Hartmann, described him as 'simple, courteous, approachable and intelligent'. In later years he struck people as unapproachable and cold; in March 1915, he would still have been a great deal like the romantic young student who got drunk on vodka and tried to make peace with everybody. But he was also a well-known writer and journalist, whose lectures had attracted widespread attention; so he now had the confidence not to succumb to the charisma of this man with the piercing eyes, but to regard him with a certain scepticism. And although Gurdjieff spoke knowledgeably about yoga, Ouspensky's scepticism seemed to be justified when Gurdjieff declined to name some of the eminent professors whom he claimed were interested in his work. It increased when Gurdjieff took him to a flat to meet his pupils. He had spoken of the enormous expense of the apartments he had taken for his 'Work', but this place was obviously the kind of flat that schoolteachers were given free. One of the pupils read aloud from a manuscript in which someone described a meeting with Gurdjieff; it struck Ouspensky as obscure and lacking in literary skill. When Gurdjieff asked him if it could be published in a newspaper, Ouspensky suspected that this oriental gentleman was simply trying to make use of him. As he left the place - in company with one of the pupils - Ouspensky was tempted to make fun of Gurdjieff, but allowed caution to prevail.

In fact, as he discovered later, Gurdjieff made a habit of trying to present himself in the worst possible light when he first met potential pupils. If they assumed he was a charlatan, it proved they lacked penetration. Ouspensky was not put off; he accepted subsequent suggestions to meet Gurdjieff in noisy cafés, and was not even discouraged when Gurdjieff suggested that he should pay 1,000 roubles a year. But when Gurdjieff hinted that he was willing to accept Ouspensky as a pupil, Ouspensky explained that he would be unable to give any undertaking to keep Gurdjieff's teachings secret. Gurdjieff apparently acceded to this. 'There are no conditions of any kind . . . Our starting point is that man does not know himself, that he is
not
.' He went on to state the principle that Ouspensky was to emphasize for the rest of his life: that man has no single 'I', but dozens of 'I's', replacing one another with the bewildering rapidity of a game of musical chairs. And at a later meeting, he stated his basic principle: that human beings are basically
machines
, and that our belief that we possess free will is an illusion. Man
could
develop some degree of free will, but it would cost an immense effort. Moreover, his starting point would need to be the recognition that he is basically a machine, a kind of robot, merely reacting to stimuli like a penny-in-the-slot machine.

Ouspensky was deeply impressed. All this was very close to his own feelings about human beings, the feelings he had expressed in
Osokin
and 'The Inventor'. But in 'The Inventor', he had made the assumption that his hero could escape from 'the trap' by turning his attention to higher intellectual pursuits. If Gurdjieff was correct, that would do him no good whatsoever; an intellectual is as 'robotic' as a peasant.

'Take yourself,' said Gurdjieff. 'If you understood everything you had written in your own book, what is it called?' - he made something impossible out of the words 'Tertium Organum' - 'I should come and bow down to you and beg you to teach me. But
you do not understand
either what you read or what you write.'

It was a disturbing picture - even more disturbing than Ouspensky's own picture of man as a plaything of demons, or a helpless puppet in the grip of Eternal Recurrence. Yet apparently Gurdjieff was certain that there
was
an escape from the trap. Man
could
be galvanized out of his condition of 'sleep' into something like waking consciousness. It was this assurance that led Ouspensky to decide to accept Gurdjieff as his teacher.

This was, of course, inevitable. Ouspensky had spent so many years looking for someone to tell him 'The Answer', how to achieve 'higher states' of awareness, how to hold on to the mystical glimpses of sheer affirmation, that if he had decided to ignore Gurdjieff's offer, he would have spent the rest of his life wondering what he had missed. Yet with the wisdom of hindsight, we can see that his decision involved certain disadvantages that would continue to haunt him for the rest of his life. Gurdjieff was right when he said that if Ouspensky had understood everything he had written in
Tertium Organum
, he would have been a great teacher. In spite of the pessimism of
Osokin
and
Talks with a Devil
, Ouspensky had come very close indeed to finding his own answer. There was a basic sense in which he did not need Gurdjieff. In order to understand this, we need to look more closely at
Tertium Organum
(subtitled 'A Key to the Enigmas of the World'), which had been published in 1912.

Let us begin by looking at an experience that dated from 1908:

It was in the sea of Marmora, on a rainy day of winter, the far-off high and rocky shores were of a pronounced violet colour of every shade, including the most tender, fading into grey and blending with the grey sky. The sea was the colour of lead mixed with silver. I remember all these colours. The steamer was going north. I remained at the rail, looking at the waves. The white crest of waves were running towards us. A wave would run at the ship, raised as if desiring to hurl its crest upon it, rushing up with a howl. The steamer heeled, shuddered and slowly straightened back; then from afar a new wave came running, I watched this play of waves with the ship, and felt them draw me to themselves. It was not at all that desire to jump down which one feels in mountains but something infinitely more subtle. The waves were drawing my soul to themselves. And suddenly I felt that it went to them. It lasted an instant, perhaps less than an instant, but I entered into the waves, and with them rushed with a howl at the ship. And in that instant
I became all
. The waves - they were myself; the far violet mountains, the wind, the clouds hurrying from the north, the great steamship, heeling and rushing irresistibly forward - all were myself. I sensed the enormous heavy body - my body - all its motions, shudderings, waverings and vibrations, fire, pressure of steam and weight of engines were
inside
me, the unmerciful and unyielding propelling screw which pushed and pushed me forward, never for a moment releasing me, the rudder which determined all my motion - all this was myself: also two sailors . . . and the black snake of smoke coming in clouds out of the funnel . . . all.