Read Online The Strange Life of P. D. Ouspensky by Colin Wilson - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Colin Wilson
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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
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
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