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

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