The Strange Life of P. D. Ouspensky (6 page)

The American psychologist Abraham Maslow made the same discovery when he studied healthy people, and discovered that all healthy people had frequent 'peak experiences', experiences of sudden overwhelming happiness. Such people were good 'copers'; they tackled problems in an almost competitive spirit enjoying the sensation of overcoming them. Maslow also discovered that when he talked to his students about peak experiences, they began recalling their own past peak experiences - many of which they had half forgotten - and they
began having peak experiences all the time
. Talking about peak experiences made them feel happy and optimistic, and this feeling was the major step towards having another peak experience. This is a matter to which we shall return in the final chapter.

Maslow's 'copers', then, were in a sense the opposite of the young and romantic Ouspensky, with his feeling that life is a trap. They were fundamentally 'realistic', and expected to solve problems with enough effort. The same 'realism' is also to be found - unexpectedly - in the young Albert Camus after he had escaped a 'death sentence' by tuberculosis. Although Camus had concluded that life is meaningless - he called it 'absurd' - he nevertheless found himself experiencing an 'intensity of physical joy' which even produced a kind of pleasure in 'the absurd'. In an essay in a volume called
Nuptials
(
Noces
) he described standing on the beach at Djemila, in Algeria, and experiencing a sense of living reality. Thinking about death, he reflects:

I do not want to believe that death opens out onto another life. For me it is a closed door . . . All the [religious] solutions which are offered to me try to take away from man the weight of his own life. And, watching the heavy flight of the great birds in the sky at Djemila, it is exactly a certain weight in my life that I ask for and that I receive . . .

This is again a description of self-remembering, and Camus makes the important point that it involves a sense of 'the weight of his own life', like a burden that he is glad to shoulder, a sense of the real. Or it might be compared to a strong and healthy horse that enjoys pulling a cart, enjoys the feeling of the harness pressing into its chest and shoulders as it exerts its strength. Nietzsche said that happiness is the feeling that obstacles are being overcome, and this is again the secret of the peak experience.

Of equal interest in this context is the way that human beings lose their 'sense of the real'. We can see that when William James began to experience anxiety about his future, and a consequent feeling of depression, it was precisely this 'weight of his own life' that he had lost. The harness was hanging loosely around him, producing a sense of purposelessness. Nietzsche experienced the same thing in his teens, particularly after reading Schopenhauer and being convinced that life is 'absurd'. Simone de Beauvoir writes:

I look at myself in a mirror, tell myself my own story, I can never grasp myself as an entire object. I experience in myself the emptiness that is myself, I feel that I am not.

Thinking too much and having too little purpose usually produces this sense of emptiness, particularly in the young.

Three

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff was born on 28 December, 1877, so he was therefore less than a year older than Ouspensky.[1] He was born in Alexandropol, a Turkish town which had recently fallen to the Russians in the Russo-Turkish war. Gurdjieff's father was Greek, his mother Armenian. His father was a carpenter who was also a 'bard' able to recite thousands of verses from memory. When Gurdjieff saw in a magazine some verses from recently discovered tablets of the
Epic
of Gilgamesh -
the world's earliest literature - he was impressed that they were exactly as his father recited them; the oral tradition had remained accurate over 4,000 years. This led Gurdjieff to the speculation that other kinds of ancient knowledge might have survived just as long, and inspired him to embark upon the same quest as Ouspensky.

Unlike Ouspensky, Gurdjieff spent his childhood surrounded by 'miracles'. He witnessed a paralytic crawl to the tomb of a saint and walk away cured. He was present when a drought ended suddenly as a procession carrying a miracle-working icon prayed for rain. He was present at a séance when a table rapped out answers to questions with one of its legs. A half-witted fortune-teller accurately foretold that he would have an accident with a firearm. He saw a Yezidi boy unable to break out of a circle that children had drawn around him, and in later years, it took Gurdjieff and an equally strong friend to drag a Yezidi woman out of such a circle. These were all mysteries to which Gurdjieff's highly active intelligence demanded an answer.

Gurdjieff had a highly developed practical inclination; he could mend almost anything, and at one point made a living weaving carpets. But his earliest inclination was to become a priest. He was always deeply religious; the word 'God' came easily to his lips. (Ouspensky, on the other hand, discouraged his students from thinking or talking about religion.) In spite of this, he was cheerfully amoral where money was concerned. As a young man he helped to survey the proposed route of a railway, and approached the leading men in town or villages through which the railway was scheduled to pass, offering to 'fix' a station there - for a price.

As a teenager, Gurdjieff set out with a friend called Pogossian looking for the secrets of the 'Sarmoung Brotherhood' which supposedly dated from 2500 bc. He went to Smyrna, then to Egypt, Jerusalem and India. In the book in which he describes these adventures,
Meetings with Remarkable Men
, he claims to have spent three months in a monastery in the Himalayas, where - he hinted - he had discovered some of the 'secret knowledge' he was looking for.

At some point Gurdjieff learned about hypnosis from a teacher called Ekim Bey, and seems to have become a professional hypnotist, even hiring a hall in Tashkent to put on a 'magical' show. But he did not accept that hypnotism was merely 'suggestion'. He believed that it depends upon accumulating and concentrating a certain 'life force'. In later life, as we shall see, he often demonstrated this hypnotic or 'magical' ability.

Gurdjieff differed from Ouspensky in another basic respect: his attitude to sex was totally unromantic. He boasted to Bennett about the number of his illegitimate children, and spoke of women 'in terms that would have better suited a fanatical Muslim polygamist'. To begin with, Ouspensky seems to have been unaware of this aspect of Gurdjieff; when he found out, it seems to have been one of the factors that led to the break that lasted the rest of his life. (Gurdjieff's deliberately 'unreasonable' demands were another.)

In 1909, in Tashkent, Gurdjieff embarked on his career as a 'teacher', with a heavy emphasis on 'occultism'. Interest in Spiritualism, Theosophy and Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy was intense, and Gurdjieff was soon regarded as a master of the occult - although he admits frankly that his reputation was largely the result of his 'skill in producing tricks'. He also became a highly successful businessman, running stores, restaurants and cinemas, and trading in cattle. By 1914, he was ready to realize his ambition of launching an 'institute' in Russia - he chose Russia because it was 'peaceful, rich and quiet'. The 1914 war was to bring these plans to nothing.

This, then, was the man Ouspensky met in March 1915: a hypnotist and 'magician' a Casanova (although he was now married to one of the Tsarina's ladies-in-waiting), something of a charlatan, yet basically a man who had acquired a profound knowledge of human nature.

There was one fundamental difference between Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. Gurdjieff, as we have seen, had learned some of the basic tricks of building up his vitality, and of using this vital power to gain influence over others. For example, everyone who met him commented on the penetration of his gaze. He was a man without self-doubt. Ouspensky was an intellectual and a romantic who had looked for his solutions in books: books about the fourth dimension, about Einstein, about yoga, about mysticism and cosmic consciousness, about the Kabbala and the Tarot and psychology. He felt that the question of freedom must be approached scientifically - that is, intellectually. He was fascinated by Gurdjieff because Gurdjieff seemed to be offering a comprehensive
system
, something his intellect could get its teeth into. Like all intellectuals, he was inclined to underestimate the importance of the body and the emotions.

In Moscow, Gurdjieff fascinated Ouspensky by the sheer range of his knowledge. When they talked about art, Gurdjieff explained that most of what we call art is mere fantasy and subjectivity. But, he said, there is such a thing as 'objective art', which is a kind of mathematics. There are objective works of art - like the Sphinx - which can be read like books, 'not only with the mind, but with the emotions, if they are sufficiently developed'. He went on to describe a statue which he had come across in Central Asia, in the desert at the foot of the Hindu Kush.

At first it produced upon us simply the impression of being a curiosity. But after a while we began to feel that this figure contained many things, a big, complete and complex system of cosmology. And slowly, step by step, we began to decipher this system. It was in the body of the figure, in its legs, in its arms, in its head, in its eyes, in its ears, everywhere. In the whole statue there was nothing accidental, nothing without meaning. And gradually we understood the aim of the people who built this statue. We began to
feel
their thoughts, their feelings. Some of us thought that we saw their faces, heard their voices. At all events, we grasped the meaning of what they wanted to convey to us across thousands of years, and not only the meaning, but all the feelings and the emotions connected with it as well. That indeed was art!

As he travelled back to Petrograd from Moscow on the train, Ouspensky asked himself: is it possible that Gurdjieff actually
knew
what had to be known in order to proceed from words or ideas to deeds, to 'facts'? And although he could not answer the question positively, he 'had an inner conviction that something had already changed for me and that now everything would go differently'.

For readers of
Tertium Organum
and
A New Model of the Universe
, the absurdity is that - as Gurdjieff himself admitted - Ouspensky
already
'knew' an enormous amount - perhaps almost as much as Gurdjieff could teach him. This is nowhere more apparent than in the chapter of
A New Model of the Universe
called 'Experimental Mysticism'.

Here, Ouspensky describes how, in 1910, he began a series of experiments whose aim was to explore 'mystical' consciousness. He does not explain how he went about it, but a reference to William James's
Varieties of Religious Experience
suggests that he simply used nitrous oxide, 'laughing gas', diluted heavily with air. James had already noted that nitrous oxide can produce a state when 'depth beyond depth of truth seemed revealed to the inhaler. This truth fades out, however, or escapes at the moment of coming to.'

Ouspensky also found himself frustrated by a similar problem:

A change in the state of consciousness as a result of my experiments began to take place very soon, much more quickly and easily than I thought. But the chief difficulty was that the new state of consciousness which was obtained gave at once so much that was new and unexpected, and these new and unexpected experiences came upon me and flashed by so quickly, that I could not find words, could not find forms of speech, could not find concepts, which would enable me to remember what had occurred even for myself, still less to convey it to anyone else.

One of his central insights was that:

All that we half-consciously construct with regard to the unknown is completely and utterly wrong. The unknown is unlike anything that we can suppose about it. The complete unexpectedness of everything that is met with in these experiences, from great to small, makes the description of them difficult. First of all, everything is unified, everything is linked together, everything is explained by something else and in its turn explains another thing. There is nothing separate, that is, nothing that can be named or described
separately
. In order to describe the first impressions, the first sensations, it is necessary to describe
all
at once. The new world with which one comes into contact has no sides, so that it is impossible to describe first one side and then the other. All of it is visible at every point; but how in fact to describe anything in these conditions - that question I could not answer.

William James had arrived at the same conclusions in an essay called 'A Suggestion About Mysticism': that states of mystical intuition may only be very sudden and very great extensions of the ordinary 'field of consciousness'. In other words, the mystic simply 'sees further', as if he has suddenly become a bird and can see into the distance. Naturally, he could not possibly describe all he sees at once; in fact, without a great deal of training, he would find it very difficult to describe anything at all, just as most of us would find it impossible to start putting into words the view from an aeroplane.

James went on to mention three 'mystical glimpses' that he had experienced, and goes on:

In each of the three like cases, the experience broke in abruptly upon a perfectly commonplace situation and lasted perhaps less than two minutes. In one instance I was engaged in conversation, but I doubt whether the interlocutor noticed my abstraction. What happened each time was that I seemed all at once to be reminded of a past experience; and this reminiscence, ere I could conceive or name it distinctly, developed into something further that belonged with it, this in turn into something further still, and so on, until the process faded out, leaving me amazed at the sudden vision of increasing ranges of distant fact of which I would give no articulate account. The mode of consciousness was perceptual, not conceptual - the field expanding so fast that there seemed no time for conception or identification to get in its work. There was a strongly exciting sense that my knowledge of past (or present?) reality was enlarging pulse by pulse, but so rapidly that my intellectual processes could not keep up the pace. The
content
was thus entirely lost to retrospection - it sank into the limbo into which dreams vanish as we gradually awake. The feeling - I won't call it belief - that I had had a sudden
opening
, had seen through a window, as it were, distant realities that incomprehensibly belonged with my own life, was so strong that I cannot shake it off today.