The Strange Life of P. D. Ouspensky by Colin Wilson Read Free Book Online

That shape am I , I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I became a mass of quivering fear. After this the universe was changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a general sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before, and that I have never felt since. It was like a revelation; and although the immediate feelings passed away, the experience has made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since. It gradually faded, but for months I was unable to go into the dark alone.
    In general I dreaded to be left alone. I remember wondering how other people could live, how I myself had ever lived, so unconscious of that pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life. My mother in particular, a very cheerful person, seemed to me a perfect paradox in her unconsciousness of danger, which you may well believe I was very careful not to disturb by revealing my own state of mind.

    James's problem was that he had, like the neurasthenic patients, fallen into a state of gloom in which life had 'grown into one tissue of impossibilities', an endless series of hurdles that he lacked the strength to tackle. This sense of helplessness, of will-lessness, had sapped his 'vital reserves' until, so to speak, his inner-resistance gave way - plunging him into a state in which nothing seemed worth the effort - hence the sudden identification with the green-faced patient.
    He describes how he succeeded in emerging very slowly from this slough of despond when he came upon a definition of free will by the French philosopher Charles Renouvier: 'the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts'. Renouvier had commented that we may feel that all our actions are mechanical, an automatic response to stimuli, until we consider the fact that we can think one thing rather than another . I can decide what to think; I can switch my train of thought from one track to another, and back at will to the first track. I can summon up images of rain, of snow, of July sunshine, of autumn gales, all merely by willing it.
    The moment James saw that Renouvier was correct, he began to emerge from his hopeless gloom, and he struggled his way back to the state of intense creative activity in which he wrote his classic Principles of Psychology .
    It is clear that this intellectual conviction that he possessed free will made all the difference between sickness and health. If he had continued to believe himself a machine, he would have continued to be undermined by misery and self-doubt. It follows that if James had met Gurdjieff at that fateful point in his life, and accepted his view that we possess virtually no free will, he might never have made a complete recovery from his neurasthenia.So it becomes possible to see what went wrong for Ouspensky after his meeting with Gurdjieff. When he had finished Tertium Organum in 1911, he had an excited sense of being on the verge of discovering the answer. It was obviously very close, and something to do with maintaining a high level of excitement and 'eagerness'. His friend who could see 'difference' all the time was obviously near to it.
    And at this crucial point, Gurdjieff explained to him that the first thing he must understand was that he could do nothing , plunging him back into something like William James's state of inner paralysis. Ouspensky must have known this was nonsense. By pursuing his goal in his own way, he had achieved a great deal. What he needed now was to maintain that high level of drive and optimism that had inspired Tertium Organum , and that was now inspiring A New Model of the Universe . But Gurdjieff was an impressive