The Strange Life of P. D. Ouspensky (7 page)

This also makes us aware of Ouspensky's problem as a 'teacher' as well as a learner. The 'vision' expanded 'pulse by pulse' so that his intellect could not keep pace with it. So, clearly, Ouspensky's intellectual approach to the problem of a wider reality would never work; it would be like trying to cross the Atlantic in a rowing boat.

In these 'mystical' states, as on the Sea of Marmora, Ouspensky found that the relation between the 'objective' and the 'subjective' ceased to apply:

Here I saw that the objective and the subjective could change places. The one could become the other. It is very difficult to express this. The habitual mistrust of the subjective disappeared; every thought, every feeling, every image, was immediately objectified in real, substantial form which differed in no way from the forms of objective phenomena; and at the same time objective phenomena somehow disappeared, lost all reality, appeared entirely subjective, fictitious, invented, having no real existence.

Ouspensky compares this world to 'a world of
very complicated mathematical relations
':

. . . this means a world in which everything is connected, in which nothing exists separately and in which at the same time the relations between things have a real existence apart from the things themselves; or possibly, 'things' do not exist and only 'relations' exist.

Another writer on mystical experience, R.H. Ward, described (in
A Drug-Taker's Notes
) how, under dental gas,

I passed, after the first few inhalations . . . directly into
a state of consciousness already far more complete than the fullest degree of ordinary waking consciousness
[my italics], and that I then passed progressively upwards . . . into finer and finer degrees of this heightened awareness . . . This sense of upward movement continued until it seemed to me that I was rapidly passing through what I afterwards told myself was a 'region of ideas.'

This is clearly Ouspensky's region of mathematical relations.

To speak of relations as 'real' sounds paradoxical (after all, relations can change from moment to moment), but a little reflection can make the meaning clearer. In fact, we are so accustomed to things being 'connected' that we take it for granted. When I utter a sentence my 'meaning' is present in my head before I begin it, but I recognize that I can only express this meaning
in time
, by uttering words. I take the 'connectedness' of the words for granted - unless I am feeling very tired, and I 'forget what I was going to say'. In such a moment we catch a glimpse of the consciousness of James's idiot, staring blankly at the world, 'seeing' everything yet unable to make the
connections
which would give it meaning. Meaning is 'connectedness', but not connectedness in time.

This, in turn, makes us aware that there is something very unsatisfactory and dull about our 'normal' perception. It 'sticks', like someone trying to plod over a very muddy field in heavy gumboots. We take this 'sticking' for granted until we are in moods of happiness and excitement, when we have the 'bird's eye view' in which we see things
related to one another
, and realize that our normal perception, in which they are separated from one another like the steps of the man in gumboots, like words in a sentence, is quite misleading.

To put it another way, what Ouspensky and James and Ward experienced was a brief glimpse of what 'normality'
should
be like ('far more complete than the fullest degree of ordinary consciousness') and that our present 'normality' is quite abnormal - or rather, sub-normal.

So, in effect, Ouspensky was in a state of intense
excitement
, in which consciousness seemed to be flowing faster. Normally, it is as slow and as solid as a glacier; in mystical states, the ice melts and it flows like a river.

This also becomes clear from Ouspensky's remark that he found it impossible to complete a sentence, because between every word, so many ideas occurred to him that he was unable to catch up. He began a sentence: 'I said yesterday . . .'

No sooner had I pronounced the word 'I' than a number of ideas began to turn in my head about the meaning of the word, in a philosophical, in a psychological and in every other sense. This was all so important, so new and profound, that when I pronounced the word 'said', I could not understand in the least what I meant by it. Tearing myself away with difficulty from the first cycle of thoughts about 'I', I passed to the idea 'said', and immediately found in it an infinite content. The idea of speech, the possibility of expressing thoughts in words, the past tense of the verb, each of these ideas produced an explosion of thoughts, conjectures, comparisons and associations. Thus, when I pronounced the word 'yesterday' I was already quite unable to understand why I had said it. But it in its turn immediately dragged me into the depths of the problems of time, of past, present and future, and before me such possibilities of approach to these problems began to open up that my breath was taken away.

Again, this is all quite logical. When consciousness is 'unfrozen' it ceases to be 'serial', like the words in a sentence, and becomes 'simultaneous' - that is, turns into a bird's eye view. It is obviously very similar to the state called 'inspiration', in which an author or musician has to write at top speed to keep up with his insights.

This image makes us aware that human beings are trapped in time, carried along by it as if on a river. Meanings flash past, like advertisement billboards on the bank, but it is hard to read them. Yet every time we become 'absorbed', every time we pay total attention to some meaning, we cause time to
slow down
. This is one of the most interesting things about the human condition: that we possess this power to 'slow time down'. It implies that, if we wanted to, we could somehow bring time to a halt and be in the presence of meaning. Ordinary men take it for granted that they are the slaves of time, and that, like an ever-rolling stream, it will carry them into oblivion. Philosophers and mystics glimpse this possibility that time is not an absolute; if we could learn to use our powers correctly, we could control it.

Ouspensky had practical experience of the 'non-absoluteness' of space and time. He describes how, after half an hour of intense discipline, 'I could quite clearly see the faces of people at a distance at which normally one would have difficulty in distinguishing one figure from another.' Space had 'telescoped'. On another occasion, he recalled his intention of making a trip to Moscow when he was in the midst of his 'experiments':

Suddenly, without any warning, I received the comment that I should not go to Moscow at Easter. Why? In answer to this I saw how, starting from the day of the experiment. . . events began to develop in a definite order and sequence. Nothing new happened. But the causes, which I could see quite well and which were there on the day of my experiment, were evolving, and having come to the results which unavoidably followed from them, they formed just before Easter a whole series of difficulties which in the end prevented me from going to Moscow. The fact in itself . . . had a merely curious character, but the interesting side of it was that I saw what looked like a possibility of calculating the future - the whole future was contained in the present. I saw all that had happened before Easter resulted directly from what had already existed two months earlier.

Ouspensky's insight is a direct contradiction of modern 'Chaos Theory', which asserts that, because of the basic mathematical laws of 'chaos' no physical process (the weather, for example) is predictable for more than a day or two ahead.

In mystical states, the normal
sense
of time, which is 'serial', also vanishes - or rather, Ouspensky says, 'Together with it or within it there appeared as it were another feeling of time, and two moments or ordinary time, like two words of my sentence, could be separated by long periods of another time.' In other words, moments of 'serial time' were separated by flashes of 'bird's eye time', extending 'crosswise' like another dimension.

We can begin to see why mystics find it so difficult to express what they see. It is not that mystical consciousness is contradictory or illogical. It is simply that 'ordinary consciousness' is based on a set of false suppositions about the absoluteness of time, and that the initial problem is to explain why something that seems 'common sense' and self-evident is full of misconceptions and errors. At one point in his experiments, Ouspensky tried hard to summarize his new insights so he could recall them later, and wrote a sentence on a sheet of paper. When he read what he had written the next day, it was: 'Think in other categories.' In other words, these insights involved a totally different
approach
to what we call reality, a recognition that most of our
premises
are wrong.

Another long passage that describes this sense of immense richness and multiplicity has even wider implications. Ouspensky describes sitting on a settee and looking at a copper ash-tray. Again, it aroused 'a whirlwind of thoughts and images' - where did copper come from, how had it been discovered, how had people learned to work it, how is a modern ash-tray made . . . ? He tried to express this 'whirlwind' of thoughts on paper, and read the next day: '
One could go mad from one ashtray
.'

But what fascinated him in retrospect was the feeling that 'the ash-tray was alive', 'that it thought, understood and told me all about itself'. 'Everything is alive,' I said to myself . . . 'there is nothing dead, it is only we who are dead.'

(Another Gurdjieff disciple, C. Daly King, had experienced a similar vision on a New Jersey railway platform: the bricks of the station 'appeared to be tremendously alive . . . seething almost joyously inside and [giving] the distinct impression that . . . they were living and actively liking if. People, on the other hand, looked dead, really dead'.[1])

This led Ouspensky to the recognition that:

Everything was living, everything was conscious of itself. Everything spoke to me and could speak to everything. Particularly interesting were the houses and other buildings that I passed, especially the old houses. They were living things, full of thoughts, feelings, moods and memories. The people who lived in them were their
thoughts, feelings, moods
.

(It is interesting to note that Ouspensky later achieved this same sense of the 'personality' of houses from doing Gurdjieff's self-remembering exercises. It should also be clear that Gurdjieff was describing the same sensation when he spoke of the statue at the foot of the Hindu Kush, and gradually began to understand the thoughts and feelings of those who made it until he felt that the statue was able to 'speak' to him.) Ouspensky goes on:

I remember once being struck by an ordinary cab-horse in the Nevsky, by its head, its face. It expressed the whole being of the horse. Looking at the horse's face I understood all that could be understood about a horse. All the traits of horse nature, all of which a horse is capable, all of which it is incapable, all that it can do, all that it cannot do; all this was expressed in the lines and features of the horse's face. A dog once gave me a similar sensation. At the same time the horse and the dog were not simply horse and dog; they were 'atoms', conscious, living 'atoms' of great beings - 'the great horse' and 'the great dog.' I understood then that we are also atoms of a 'great being', 'the great man.' A glass is an atom of a 'great glass.' A fork is an atom of a 'great fork'.

In other words, Ouspensky was seeing Plato's world of ideas as a reality, a point also made by R.H. Ward: '. . . it seems to me very interesting that one should thus, in a dentist's chair and the twentieth century, receive practical confirmation of the theories of Plato.' All this was experienced in 'an exceedingly intense emotional state':

My attitude towards this new knowledge was in no way indifferent; I either loved it or was horrified by it, strove towards it or was amazed by it; and it was these very emotions, with a thousand others, which gave me the possibility of understanding the nature of the new world I came to know.

It is important to note that Ouspensky felt that his method of obtaining these insights - through laughing gas - was the wrong way. He says that he felt that there was '
somebody
who watched me all the time and often tried to persuade me to stop my experiments, not to attempt to go along this path, which was wrong and unlawful from the point of view of certain principles which I at that time felt and understood only dimly'. The basic principle is, in fact, self-evident. There is no point whatever in having thousands of insights if you cannot hang on to them in some way.

J.G. Bennett was to describe a similar experience in the forest at Fontainebleau in 1923, when a tremendous bout of 'super-effort' raised him into the 'exceedingly intense emotional stats' in which he was able to evoke feelings at will:[1]

. . . I said to myself: 'I will be astonished.' Instantly I was overwhelmed with amazement . . . Then the thought of fear came to me. At once I was shaking with terror. Unnamed horrors menaced me on every side. I thought of 'joy', and I felt my heart would burst from rapture. The word 'love' came to me, and I was pervaded with such fine shades of tenderness and compassion that I saw that I had not the remotest idea of the depth and the range of love. Love was everywhere and in everything. It was infinitely adaptable to every shade of need.
After a time, it became too much for me, it seemed that if I plunged any more deeply into the mysteries of love, I would cease to exist.
[My italics.] I wanted to be free from this power to feel whatever I chose, and at once it left me.

Bennett goes on to quote Blake's lines:

Grown old in love, from seven to seven times seven
I oft have wished for hell for change from heaven,

and adds:

I realised that for Blake this was no mere trick of words, but the expression of a real experience. I knew that the world I had entered was one where there is no loneliness, because all who enter into that Eternal Source meet there as brothers.