Ouspensky

P. D. Ouspensky

Ouspensky brought the rigor of a philosopher to the country most philosophers refuse to enter: higher dimensions, the expansion of consciousness, and the hidden life of a cosmos in which nothing is dead. In Tertium Organum he argued that our ordinary three-dimensional world is only a narrow slice of a far larger reality, that the logic of Aristotle and Bacon must be completed by a third instrument of thought, and that the awakening of consciousness can disclose a living, conscious universe. He went on to become the great expositor of Gurdjieff's Fourth Way, the teaching that ordinary humanity is asleep and may, with great effort, awaken.

The corpus and how the chat answers. This room reads Tertium Organum (1912) in the Bragdon and Bessaraboff English translation of the early 1920s, public domain by way of the Internet Archive. His later works, A New Model of the Universe (1931) and the posthumous In Search of the Miraculous (1949), the classic record of Gurdjieff's system, remain under copyright, so the chat discusses the Fourth Way teaching from training knowledge, with that disclosure, and draws its quotations from Tertium Organum, which it cites by chapter. Expect citations to Tertium Organum by chapter.

Life. Ouspensky was born in 1878 in Moscow, a journalist and restless seeker who traveled through India, Ceylon, and Egypt in search of the miraculous, the hidden knowledge he was sure must survive somewhere. Tertium Organum, published in 1912, made his name. In 1915, back in Russia, he met George Gurdjieff and became his foremost pupil and the systematizer of his teaching, and although he eventually broke with the man, he carried the Work to England, where for decades he taught a circle that drew many writers and intellectuals into the discipline of self-study. His ideas reached far into the human-potential currents of the century that followed.

Where to begin. Start with Tertium Organum for the philosophy of higher dimensions and consciousness, then read A New Model of the Universe for the mature esoteric system of time, recurrence, and experimental mysticism, and In Search of the Miraculous for the Fourth Way teaching of Gurdjieff set down in full.

The third canon of thought. The strange title states the program. Aristotle's Organon had given the logic of the senses and of classification; Francis Bacon's Novum Organum had given the logic of experiment and induction; Ouspensky proposes a Tertium Organum, a third instrument of thought, in truth older than both, that grasps what ordinary logic cannot. Common logic rests on the axiom that a thing is either A or not-A; but the higher reality, he argues, does not obey that rule, and to think the infinite and the living unity of the world we need a different logic of intuition, in which a thing can be at once itself and its opposite.

The fourth dimension and the mind that receives it. Building on Kant and on the mathematics of higher space, Ouspensky argues that our three-dimensional world is not the world as it is but the world as our minds are built to receive it. The three-dimensionality of the world, he writes, is a property of its reflection in our consciousness. Time, he suggests, is the fourth dimension, the direction our narrow consciousness cannot see as space; a wider consciousness would perceive time spatially, beholding past, present, and future together, and would meet the higher-dimensional reality that stands behind all appearances.

The living universe. From this follows his boldest claim, a thoroughgoing panpsychism. If the world is richer than our three dimensions show, then the lifeless, mechanical nature of the materialists is an artifact of our cramped perception. There is nothing dead or unconscious, he writes; everything lives, everything breathes, thinks, and feels, everything is conscious, and everything speaks. The cosmos is a vast hierarchy of consciousnesses, alive through and through, and the widening of our own consciousness is the road by which it can be known.

Higher consciousness. The aim of the whole enterprise is the transformation of consciousness. Ouspensky takes seriously the reports of the mystics and his own experiments with altered states: that there exist higher conditions of mind, a cosmic consciousness, in which the ordinary borders of self and world dissolve, time changes its character, and the unity and aliveness of all things is known directly. Philosophy, he insists, must treat these states as data to be understood rather than dismissing them as illusions, for they are reports from the wider reality his geometry had argued must exist.

The Fourth Way: that ordinary life is sleep. After 1915 Ouspensky gave himself to systematizing Gurdjieff's teaching, the Fourth Way, whose starting point is bracing and severe. Ordinary human beings, it holds, are not awake but pass their lives in a kind of waking sleep, mechanical, driven by outside influences, possessing no single unified self but a crowd of shifting and contradictory little selves, and no real will, so that things merely happen to a person who imagines he acts. Yet unlike the older paths of the monk, the fakir, and the yogi, the Fourth Way is walked in the midst of ordinary life, through self-observation and the constant effort of self-remembering, the struggle to be present and aware. By such work, against long odds, a person may begin to awaken, to forge a real and lasting self, and to develop the higher faculties that lie dormant in everyone. Ouspensky made this exacting teaching intelligible to the modern West.

Reception, and adjacent reading. Ouspensky held, too, in his haunting doctrine of recurrence, that we live the same life over and over, and that the whole point of awakening is to change what otherwise merely repeats. Read now, he is a serious philosopher of consciousness and time in esoteric dress, the thinker who insisted that ordinary perception is a narrow window and that mind itself can be transformed. He extended the epistemology of Kant, for whom space and time are forms of our own cognition, into a doctrine of higher dimensions; he took up the cosmic consciousness explored by William James in the psychology of religious experience; his eternal recurrence reworks a thought of Nietzsche; his living, conscious universe renews the vision of the Hermetic tradition and its correspondence of all things; and his philosophy of time and intuition runs parallel to that of Bergson. His question, whether the world we perceive is the whole of the world, has lost none of its force.