Free The Strange Life of P. D. Ouspensky by Colin Wilson

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