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

teacher. He seemed to know all the answers.
    To begin with, there was self-remembering. This was an exercise that involved looking at an object, and making an effort to be aware of yourself looking at it . Anyone can see how difficult this is. Close your eyes and become aware of yourself. Now open them and look at your watch. Instantly, you cease to be aware of yourself and become aware of your watch. 'You' disappear. With a considerable effort you can reawaken awareness of yourself as you look at your watch, but if you are not careful, you then 'forget' your watch and become aware only of yourself. (On the other hand, if you concentrate your attention while reading this book, you will note that you become aware of yourself as well as of the book.)
    Ouspensky recognized that all moments of happiness are moments of self-remembering. What happened on the Sea of Marmora was a flash of self-remembering. What happened when he sensed the difference between the factory chimneys and the prison walls was self-remembering. We often experience self-remembering when setting out on a journey. But if we think about this for a moment we see the reason why. Because we feel relaxed, and we are looking forward to what is to come, we experience a feeling of eager expectation , the feeling that the world is a fascinating and delightful place. The same thing happens if we experience sudden relief when we had been expecting something unpleasant to happen - like a man being reprieved from a firing squad. The answer lies in that surge of optimism.
    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