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

this context is the way that human beings lose their 'sense of the real'. We can see that when William James began to experience anxiety about his future, and a consequent feeling of depression, it was precisely this 'weight of his own life' that he had lost. The harness was hanging loosely around him, producing a sense of purposelessness. Nietzsche experienced the same thing in his teens, particularly after reading Schopenhauer and being convinced that life is 'absurd'. Simone de Beauvoir writes:

    I look at myself in a mirror, tell myself my own story, I can never grasp myself as an entire object. I experience in myself the emptiness that is myself, I feel that I am not.

    Thinking too much and having too little purpose usually produces this sense of emptiness, particularly in the young.

Three
The Master

    George Ivanovich Gurdjieff was born on 28 December, 1877, so he was therefore less than a year older than Ouspensky.[1] He was born in Alexandropol, a Turkish town which had recently fallen to the Russians in the Russo-Turkish war. Gurdjieff's father was Greek, his mother Armenian. His father was a carpenter who was also a 'bard' able to recite thousands of verses from memory. When Gurdjieff saw in a magazine some verses from recently discovered tablets of the Epic of Gilgamesh - the world's earliest literature - he was impressed that they were exactly as his father recited them; the oral tradition had remained accurate over 4,000 years. This led Gurdjieff to the speculation that other kinds of ancient knowledge might have survived just as long, and inspired him to embark upon the same quest as Ouspensky.
    Unlike Ouspensky, Gurdjieff spent his childhood surrounded by 'miracles'. He witnessed a paralytic crawl to the tomb of a saint and walk away cured. He was present when a drought ended suddenly as a procession carrying a miracle-working icon prayed for rain. He was present at a séance when a table rapped out answers to questions with one of its legs. A half-witted fortune-teller accurately foretold that he would have an accident with a firearm. He saw a Yezidi boy unable to break out of a circle that children had drawn around him, and in later years, it took Gurdjieff and an equally strong friend to drag a Yezidi woman out of such a circle. These were all mysteries to which Gurdjieff's highly active intelligence demanded an answer.
    Gurdjieff had a highly developed practical inclination; he could mend almost anything, and at one point made a living weaving carpets. But his earliest inclination was to become a priest. He was always deeply religious; the word 'God' came easily to his lips. (Ouspensky, on the other hand, discouraged his students from thinking or talking about religion.) In spite of this, he was cheerfully amoral where money was concerned. As a young man he helped to survey the proposed route of a railway, and approached the leading men in town or villages through which the railway was scheduled to pass, offering to 'fix' a station there - for a price.
    As a teenager, Gurdjieff set out with a friend called Pogossian looking for the secrets of the 'Sarmoung Brotherhood' which supposedly dated from 2500 bc. He went to Smyrna, then to Egypt, Jerusalem and India. In the book in which he describes these adventures, Meetings with Remarkable Men , he claims to have spent three months in a monastery in the Himalayas, where - he hinted - he had discovered some of the 'secret knowledge' he was looking for.
    At some point Gurdjieff learned about hypnosis from a teacher called Ekim Bey, and seems to have become a professional hypnotist, even hiring a hall in Tashkent to put on a 'magical' show. But he did not accept that hypnotism was merely 'suggestion'. He believed that it depends upon accumulating and concentrating a certain 'life force'. In later life, as we shall see, he often demonstrated this hypnotic or 'magical' ability.
    Gurdjieff differed from Ouspensky in another basic respect: his attitude to sex was