The Strange Life of P. D. Ouspensky (8 page)

Bennett's vision of the infinite varieties of love leaves no doubt that he had entered the same state of 'unfrozen' consciousness as Ouspensky - with a sense of the infinite 'connectedness' of everything - and that he had soon had enough of it. What is the good of being
shown
the answer if it promptly escapes us, due to our inability to capture it in words and concepts? Our
job
, as Ouspensky well knew, is to capture 'visions' in words and concepts, so they become permanently available to all men. The main business of writers is to trap 'meanings' in words - as if someone had invented a camera to take photographs of the advertisement signs as they flash past us - so that other men can examine them at leisure. The main point of this exercise is to fill us with courage and certainty, so we no longer have any doubt about our purpose and direction.

Now in fact, it had precisely the opposite effect on Ouspensky:

The experiments almost always ended in sleep. During this sleep I passed into the usual state and awoke in the ordinary world, in the world in which we awake every morning. But this world contained something extraordinarily oppressive, it was incredibly empty, colourless and lifeless. It was as though everything in it was wooden, as if it was an enormous wooden machine with creaking wooden wheels, wooden thoughts, wooden moods, wooden sensations; everything was terribly slow, scarcely moved, or moved with a melancholy wooden creaking. Everything was dead, soulless, feelingless.

They were terrible, these moments of awakening in an unreal world after a real one, in a dead world after a living, in a limited world, cut into small pieces, after an infinite and entire world.

But it was Ouspensky's innate romanticism that made this attitude inevitable. He could see no advantage in 'frozen' (or as he calls it, 'wooden') consciousness. This is again why Ouspensky felt that it was somehow wrong for him to experiment with nitrous oxide. He was not yet ready for a glimpse of an 'infinite and entire world', and it only filled him with a longing for a 'land of lost content'. He failed to realize that a world 'cut into small pieces' is far more easily
recorded
than an 'infinite and entire world'. So he was unable to
grasp
the meaning of his extraordinary glimpse of the answer to all his questions.

Yet on one level at least, that meaning should have been clear. A 'bird's eye view' raises us above the materiality of everyday life, and enables us to see it from a distance. This is what happens when we study history or philosophy or become absorbed in a work of art. They also enable us to contemplate our world with a new sense of 'connectedness'. And it is the
intellect
that enables us to take this 'bird's eye view'. In a sense, therefore, the author of
Tertium Organum
and
A New Model of the Universe
was already on the right path before he met Gurdjieff, and his later distrust of the 'way of intellect', of 'mere ideas', was unjustified.

This is something that becomes very clear as we read the rest of
A New Model of the Universe
. The chapter on Experimental Mysticism is followed by a chapter called 'In Search of the Miraculous',[1] in which we can sense that Ouspensky was gradually coming closer to his 'answer'. It is a series of descriptions of various places: Notre Dame, the Pyramids, the Sphinx, the Buddha with sapphire eyes in a temple near Colombo, the Taj Mahal, all of which Ouspensky regards as forms of 'objective art' that can speak directly to human beings. Gurdjieff might have dismissed these descriptions as mere 'poetry'. But because Ouspensky is a poet, they convey more than his intellectual speculations. He felt that the Buddha with the sapphire eyes was communicating to him:

All the gloom that rose from the depths of my soul seemed to clear up. It was as if the Buddha's face communicated its calm to me. Everything that up to now had troubled me and appeared so serious and important, now became small, insignificant, unworthy of notice . . .

Ouspensky was beginning to recognize that his problem was that he had never outgrown the pessimistic romanticism that pervades
Ivan Osokin
.

Unfortunately, there is a sense in which his chance to outgrow it ended when he met Gurdjieff. Ouspensky's interpretation of Gurdjieff s teaching was that man possesses very little freedom - so little that even
highly directed
efforts seldom achieve their purpose. 'Man can do nothing: he is a machine controlled by external influences, not by his own will, which is an illusion,' Ouspensky told Bennett a few years later.

There is one basic objection to this, an objection that might be regarded as the central point of this book:
if it was true, then how is it that Ouspensky was able to achieve so much before he met Gurdjieff?

Clearly, what Ouspensky needed when he returned to Russia in 1914 was to follow his own creative path, to try to pursue the implications of his vision on the Sea of Marmora, to try to grasp the significance of the 'difference' he had sensed as he looked at the Peter and Paul fortress; above all, to understand of the 'connectivity' of his nitrous oxide visions.
A New Model of the Universe
is still full of that spirit of eagerness and enthusiasm that infuses
Tertium Organum
. This applies particularly to the remarkable chapter on the superman. It is full of statements that seem a flat contradiction of his view that will is an illusion:

We have indeed no grounds whatever for denying the possibility of a real, living superman in the past, or in the present, or in the future. At the same time, we must recognise in our inner world the presence of seeds of something higher than that by which we ordinarily live, and we must recognise the possibility of the sprouting of these seeds and their manifestation in forms at present incomprehensible to us.

A few paragraphs later, he expresses an insight that came from his mystical experiences:

An intellectual approach to the idea of superman is possible only after a very long and persistent training of the mind. Ability to think is the first necessary stage of the initiation . . . What does it mean to be able to think? It means to be able to think differently from the way in which we are accustomed to think, that is to say, to conceive the world in new categories. We have simplified our conception of the world too much, we have become accustomed to picture it to ourselves as too uniform, and we must learn anew to understand its complexity.

All this is practically a contradiction of his 'Gurdjieffian approach'. 'We have simplified our conception of the world too much.' Why? Because we see it
robotically
or mechanically, so we have as little idea of reality as a snail has of the sun, the darkness and the rain. We must learn to 'think in different categories', to grasp the
difference
between things which our 'mechanicalness' irons out. Ouspensky is not telling us that free will is an illusion, that we have so many 'I's' that thinking is virtually a waste of time - an attitude that already plants the seeds of doubt that undermines the 'peak experience', the mood of eager expectancy, which is the starting point of achievement. He is telling us that, behind the rather gloomy facade of everyday reality, there are endless reasons for optimism.

This becomes even clearer in the final chapter of
A New Model of the Universe
, entitled 'Sex and Evolution'. Here Ouspensky distinguishes between what he calls 'infra-sex', the low form of sexual consciousness in which sex is both 'dirty' and comic, and what he calls 'normal' sex, which is altogether closer to D.H. Lawrence's vision of sex as a transformative force. What Ouspensky has recognized is that sexual desire, a man's response to a woman and vice versa, is one of the best examples of the consciousness of 'difference' and that this difference is real, not illusory. A man who sees something of the 'eternal feminine' in a woman is seeing her more truly than a man who merely sees her as an instrument of his own pleasure, or a biological organism for continuing the species. Finally there is 'supra-sex', in which we sense that sex is a glimpse of a new consciousness, a higher reality:

Mystical sensations undoubtedly and incontestably have a taste of sex . . . Of all we know in life, only in love is there a taste of the mystical, a taste of ecstasy. Nothing else in our life brings us so near to the limit of human possibilities, beyond which begins the unknown.

Here again, we have that sense of 'new worlds' which makes
Tertium Organum
so exciting.

All this must be qualified by admitting that it would be inaccurate to say that Ouspensky entirely lost this sense of poetry and excitement when he came under the influence of Gurdjieff. In fact, to begin with, he obviously found Gurdjieff s ideas the most exciting he had so far encountered. Yet as we study his exposition of these ideas in
In Search of the Miraculous
, we can also begin to see how the original excitement turned into something much more down to earth, 'scientific', and how this scientific approach slowly gave way to the pessimism of his comment that 'there is only one hope - that we should find the way to find the way to work with the higher emotional centre. And we do not know how this is to be done.'

Yet when we turn from
A New Model of the Universe
to Ouspensky's account of his meeting with Gurdjieff in
In Search of the Miraculous
, it is possible to understand that original excitement. At one of their earnest meetings, Ouspensky asked Gurdjieff about his ballet
The Struggle of the Magicians
. This is, in fact, a pleasant little love story about a wealthy man who tries to seduce the pupil of a white magician by enlisting the help of a black magician; the white magician foils his plans, but the rich man finally becomes his disciple, and the ballet ends with the suggestion that love will triumph in the end. Gurdjieff explained that the most important part of the ballet was its dances, then went on to compare them to the movements of an orrery - a device simulating the movements of the planets. In the same way, he explained, in 'sacred dances', the movements are intended to remind those who understand them of certain hidden laws of nature. Such mysterious hints were guaranteed to fascinate Ouspensky. It was the same when Gurdjieff began to talk about what he called 'the ray of creation' - the sun, the planets and the moon - and to explain that they are living beings, and that the moon is a planet in the process of birth, which may evolve to the same level as the earth. Gurdjieff was later to explain that the universe has seven levels of reality, and that the moon is the lowest of these; those who live on that level are subject to 96 laws. Man, who lives on the earth level, is subject to 48 laws. And so on up the 'ray of creation: the planets, the sun, the galaxy, the totality of worlds, the absolute, each being subject to half as many laws as the previous level, until we reach the absolute, which is subject only to its own law . . .' All this seemed to Ouspensky to reveal that Gurdjieff was the repository of the kind of secret knowledge that he had spent his life searching for.

Even so, much of what Gurdjieff had to say only reinforced Ouspensky's romantic pessimism. For example, when they sat in a noisy café speaking about the war (Gurdjieff deliberately chose such places to force Ouspensky to make 'extra effort'), Gurdjieff explained that war was the result of planetary influences. When two planets approached too closely to one another, the result was a kind of tension, such as the tension one might feel when passing too close to someone on a narrow pavement. Ouspensky asked: 'Then is there absolutely nothing that can be done?', and Gurdjieff replied gloomily:

'Absolutely nothing.'

Not all Gurdjieff's pronouncements were quite so negative. He explained, for example, that man is in prison, and that it is possible to dig a tunnel to freedom - but that one man alone can do nothing. The tunnel can only be completed by a group working together:

Furthermore, no one can escape from prison without the help of those
who have escaped before
. Only they can say in what way escape is possible, or can send tools, files or whatever may be necessary. But
one
prisoner alone cannot find these people or get into touch with them. An organisation is necessary. Nothing can be achieved without an organisation.

For a loner like Ouspensky, such a notion was a violation of his deepest instinct: the feeling that a man can find his own salvation, but not that of others. At the very end of his life he was to return to this belief.

On another occasion, Gurdjieff told his pupils the grim little parable of the magician and the sheep. A magician gets tired of the wanderings of his sheep, who were aware that they were due to be slaughtered and skinned. So he hypnotizes them and tells them that they are immortal and no harm can come to them. He also tells them that he is a good master who loves his flock. Finally, he suggests that they are not sheep at all; some he convinces that they are lions, others eagles, others men, others even magicians . . . And so the sheep stayed quietly at home until it was time for them to be slaughtered . . . This, explained Gurdjieff, 'is a very good illustration of man's position.'

As he absorbed such notions, Ouspensky must have felt that all the insights and glimpses of
Tertium Organum
and
A New Model of the Universe
were illusory, and it says a great deal for his stubborn self-belief that he still went on to complete and publish
A New Model of the Universe
.

The real problem, of course, was that Gurdjieff and Ouspensky were completely different types. Ouspensky was the intellectual romantic; Gurdjieff was the man of action. There is a sense in which Ouspensky was totally unsuited to putting Gurdjieff's method into practice. Gurdjieff's fundamental insight was the same as William James's: that it is 'some unusual idea of necessity' that induces people to make the extra efforts of will that 'carry them over the dam'. Most of us are aware that we actually need physical experience to relax and expand consciousness - experience such as travel, exercise, love-making, socializing, even eating and drinking. So Gurdjieff never lost sight of the importance of physical effort. He treated all his disciples as 'neurasthenics' who needed the 'bullying treatment', or as people suffering from snakebite who need to be forced to walk up and down to keep them awake.