The Strange Life of P. D. Ouspensky (9 page)

Ouspensky, however, was simply not the type to appreciate the 'bullying treatment'. He had already glimpsed the mystical world of total 'connectivity', William James's 'distant horizons of fact'. His most powerful desire was to establish contact with the higher centres, so he could continue to make forays into these unknown realms, and learn more of their geography. Gurdjieff was able to teach him many interesting techniques - involving complex physical movements, strenuous exercise, and breathing exercises - but these failed to achieve the results Ouspensky hoped for. Yet in abandoning his own work in favour of Gurdjieff's, he had also turned his back upon his own peculiar genius.

Four

Still it would be grossly unfair to Gurdjieff to imply that Ouspensky was fascinated solely by his hints about hidden knowledge and 'sacred mysteries'. Ouspensky was 'hooked' because he was an intellectual, and Gurdjieff's ideas formed a powerful and consistent intellectual system. Let us, before we go any further, look more closely at this system.

Human beings, says Gurdjieff, 'grow up' to a certain point, and then stop. Up to that point they are 'subsidized' by nature. But further growth can only be brought about by immense personal effort. When one of Gurdjieff's later pupils was asked to define the aim of 'the Work', she replied: 'To prevent your past from becoming your future.'

This notion is obviously common to all religious disciplines, whose aim is 'spiritual growth'. So is the notion of strenuous effort to obtain this growth - saints flogging themselves with whips, yogis sleeping on beds of nails or sitting cross-legged in the same position for weeks at a time. Where Gurdjieff differs is in his far more pragmatic approach. In order to obtain a certain result, he says, it is necessary to know precisely what you want to obtain. Saints and ascetics have so far recognized three ways: the way of the fakir, the way of the monk, and the way of the yogi. The way of the fakir is the way of physical control, the attempt to dominate the body by will-power. The way of the monk is the way of faith and religious emotion; by attempting to dominate feelings. The way of the yogi is the way of the mind; aiming to gain total control of the mind. But there is a 'Fourth Way', which Gurdjieff calls the way of the 'sly man' but which might equally well be translated as 'intelligent man'. This is the attempt to approach the problem of personal evolution through intelligent understanding, and it combines all three previous ways. Ouspensky's experiments with nitrous oxide might be regarded as an example of the Fourth Way: he was trying to take a short cut to a certain kind of knowledge, and his attempt was partially successful.

Closely connected with this notion of the four ways is Gurdjieff's assertion of the four aspects of man, which he compared to a carriage, a horse, a driver and the owner of the carriage. The carriage is the physical body, the horse is the feelings and desires, the driver is the mind, and the owner is the higher self - the part that Gurdjieff was trying to bring into being through the Work. The energies used by these four are in an ascending ladder of refinement, the physical being the coarsest and the 'owner's' the highest. Our task is to
transmute
these various energies into higher levels.

But the heart of Gurdjieff's 'System' lies in his distinction between 'essence' and 'personality'. Personality is the part of us that we develop to enable us to cope with the world - a kind of defence system. The underlying reality, the inner self - the part the Work is designed to develop - is our essence. Typically, Gurdjieff explained that one of the few men of essence he had met was a Corsican brigand, who had developed it by spending days in the hot sun, peering down the sights of his rifle, waiting for travellers to rob.

Personality encloses us like a shell. We like to believe that inside that shell is our 'true self', the 'real me'. In fact, says Guidjieff, we are full of thousands of little 'I's. They could be compared to the crystalline fragments that a windscreen shatters into when struck with a hammer. But every time we make some tremendous effort, two of the crystals fuse together. If we could make enough efforts, we would finally obtain one solid block of crystal. If that could happen, man would be virtually a god.

Our aim, then, is to make the kind of effort that will create enough 'friction' to fuse two crystals together. These efforts Gurdjieff calls 'intentional suffering'. This does not mean flogging ourselves or seeking out misery, but simply making efforts of will instead of drifting along in a robotic or mechanical state.

Self-remembering is a form of 'intentional suffering'. It should be noted that self-remembering does not necessarily entail the strenuous effort of looking at your watch and trying to be aware of yourself looking at it. It merely means maintaining alertness. At the end of
The Struggle of the Magicians
, the white magician prays: 'Lord Creator, and all you, His Assistants, help us to be able to remember ourselves at all times in order that we may avoid involuntary actions, as only through them can evil manifest itself.' This clearly means vigilance and alertness. Thomas de Hartmann tells how self-remembering once saved his life. Gurdjieff's words 'Remember yourself meant very little to him. But when he was acting as a dispatch rider, and a shell blew him off his horse, he refused to panic, but kept repeating: 'I remember myself.' Keeping his head, he caught his horse and rode off, while shells continued to fall around him. It can be seen that, in this case, self-remembering simply meant maintaining self control. (As an interesting footnote to all this, we may observe that when we succeed in maintaining states of self-remembering, one odd consequence is often the occurrence of what Jung called 'synchronicities' absurd 'coincidences' that seem to be somehow designed to show us that we are on the right track.)

According to Gurdjieff, our central problem is that we are so 'mechanical' that we slip into robotic states without even noticing. Emergencies or crises wake us up. If we could devise some form of 'alarm clock', this would solve the problem - which is undoubtedly why some people seem to cause themselves problems and crises. Gurdjieff's solution was to form groups; then the members could co-operate in keeping one another awake. In general, Gurdjieff's Work consisted in a series of disciplines designed to keep his pupils in a high state of self-awareness.

There is another aspect of the teaching that explains the deep impression it made on the pupils: Gurdjieff's 'cosmology'. We have already touched upon this in speaking of Gurdjieff s teaching on the 'planets' and the 'ray of creation'. Everything in the universe is subject to two laws: the Law of Three and the Law of Seven. We are inclined to think in terms of two forces: positive and negative, darkness and light. Gurdjieff insisted that there is always a third, a neutralizing or reconciling force (he later spoke of Holy Affirming, Holy Denying, and Holy Reconciling). In the Work, the first force is man's desire to change, the second is his laziness and inertia, the third is the new knowledge that can bring about the change. Even the Absolute is composed of three forces, which is why the next level down from it, called the totality of all worlds, is subject to three laws. If human beings live passively, making no attempt to create 'essence', when they die they collapse to the very lowest level - the moon - and become 'food for the moon', subject to 96 laws and almost incapable of freedom.

The Law of Seven concerns the energies of the vibrations of the universe, and is obviously connected with the seven levels of the 'ray of creation' (moon, earth, planet, sun, solar system, totality of worlds and Absolute - these, of course, should not be regarded literally as
the
moon,
the
earth, and so on, but as levels of being). Gurdjieff explained that the basic vibrations of the universe can be understood by studying the seven musical notes of the tonic scale. There are, he said, two 'weak points' in the scale, between mi and fa, and between ti and doh, and these are the two points where, in actuality, vibrations slow down. These breaks in the scale mean that when we set out to do something, we quite unconsciously change direction at these two points - without even noticing it - and may even end by doing the opposite of what we set out to do. The solution is to apply 'reinforcements' at these two points, and so keep the energies moving in a straight line, so to speak. So, according to Gurdjieff, all attempts to transform oneself will be wasted without some knowledge of the Law of Seven.

Gurdjieff also laid enormous emphasis on a figure he called the Enneagram: a circle with a triangle in it and each side of the triangle subdivided into two more points. The Enneagram, he said, was a symbol of his whole cosmology, showing the basic laws of the universe. The nine vertices symbolize the seven notes of the octave and the two 'breaks' (although in the Enneagram the break between ti and doh does not seem to be in the right place).

If man is to progress smoothly up the octave of evolution, he needs 'shocks' to help him over the breaks. It is the teacher's job, said Gurdjieff, to administer such shocks, and this obviously explains why he gave his pupils such a hard time.

We can now at least begin to see why Gurdjieff's teaching left his pupils in such a state of excitement. It all seemed to make practical sense, yet it offered a method of 'salvation' that gave it a religious dimension. This is why Ouspensky, like the rest, felt that he had finally received the 'revelation' he had been searching for all his life. Gurdjieff's System provided a practical method of pursuing the aims that he had always explored in a vague and uncoordinated manner. It offered a way of turning his life into a continuous effort to pursue the insights of his nitrous oxide experiences - a way that he could now feel was entirely 'lawful'.

But with the benefit of hindsight, we can see certain things that were not apparent to Ouspensky. The most important of these is that Gurdjieff deliberately
exaggerated
problems to galvanize his pupils into maximum effort. So, for example, when Ouspensky asked about life after death, Gurdjieff replied that most people are so mechanical that there is nothing in them that can survive death. Only when a man has created some degree of 'essence' is there something that can 'survive'. The 'astral body' is not something everybody possesses; it has to be created by strenuous effort and 'friction'. Yet at another time, Gurdjieff told Ouspensky that objects belonging to a dead person contain 'traces' of that person, which enable those still living to maintain contact. And Bennett tells the strange story of how, after he had lost his mother, Gurdjieff had remarked: 'She is in need of help because she cannot find her way by herself. My own mother is already free and can help her.' He then taught Bennett strenuous visualization exercises that finally - after agonizing effort - succeeded in 'summoning' the presences of Gurdjieff's mother and his own. Both stories seem to indicate an unqualified acceptance of life after death.

There was also exaggeration in Gurdjieff's assertion that most people are machines who possess no freedom whatever. The title of the third volume of his 'testament',
All and Everything,
is
Life is Real Only Then, When 'I Am'
, and it is clear that we all experience the feeling that 'life is real' in all moments of happiness and excitement. In other words, we all experience the 'I am' feeling a thousand times. It does
not
require strenuous effort. Gurdjieff is again exaggerating to keep his pupils 'up to the mark'.

Let us try to reformulate Gurdjieff's basic insights without the exaggeration.

Human beings
are
largely machines. The heart is a pump, the brain is a computer, the joints are levers. And we have achieved our supremacy as the leading species on earth because of the sheer complexity of our mechanism. We all possess a 'robot' who does things for us. When I learn something new - to drive a car, to speak a foreign language - I have to do it painfully and consciously, step by step; then my 'robot' takes over and does it for me. The human robot has learned to handle a complexity of experience that would drive any other animal to nervous breakdown.

Our problem is that such complexity tends to be self-defeating - like owning a library so huge that even the catalogue is a library in itself.

One might say that human beings are 50 per cent 'robot' and 50 per cent 'real person'. When we are happy and excited, the proportion changes: we become 49 per cent 'robot' and 51 per cent 'real'. These are the moods of 'holiday consciousness' in which we feel happy and wide awake - the moods of 'I am'. In our ordinary daily activities we are roughly 50/50. But as soon as we become tired, we become 51 per cent 'robot' and 49 per cent 'real person'.

Human beings could be compared to motor cars whose batteries recharge as they drive. If a car is left standing in a garage for months, its batteries get flat. Humans have an additional problem: when they do things 'mechanically', they also fail to recharge their vital batteries. It is only when we are driven by a sense of purpose and optimism that we recharge our batteries. Abraham Maslow described a case of a female patient who was so bored with her job in a factory that she became completely devitalized, even ceasing to menstruate. When Maslow learned that she had hoped to make a career in sociology, but had been forced to take the factory job to support her family, he advised her to study sociology at night school. As soon as she did this, the symptoms disappeared. Her sense of purpose was now recharging her batteries. The 'peak experience' could be regarded as a kind of spontaneous discharge of a highly charged battery, a spark of sheer joy.

Now in recognizing that our main problem is that we are too 'robotic', Gurdjieff could see that the basic necessity is to instil into people a high level of purpose. The robot causes us to go 'slack' so that our response to life becomes sluggish and dull. At best we experience the 50/50 state. At worst, we spend most of our time in a 51 per cent robot-state. And this tends to cause boredom and discouragement, so that problems plunge us into depression - which could be regarded as 52 per cent robot. The more robotic we become, the harder it is to escape, for our low vitality prevents us from making the effort required. Such states are extremely dangerous, for we can fall into a condition of permanent
passivity
, merely 'reacting' to life. In these states we become deeply vulnerable, physically as well as emotionally. A California psychiatrist, Wilson van Dusen, has described how long-term mental patients can become totally passive, staring at a television set all day, and continuing to stare even when it is turned off. This is an excellent image of what is wrong with human consciousness. And long-term passivity can produce physical as well as mental illness.