P. D. Ouspensky

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all Tertium Organum (1912), A New Model of the Universe (1931) and The Fourth Way.

The world as we perceive it

Ouspensky begins Tertium Organum from Kant. We do not know the world in itself; we know only our perceptions of it, and space and time are the forms in which our perceiving mind arranges them. What we call the world is a section of something larger, cut by the limits of our senses, and a different consciousness would perceive a different world. Behind every phenomenon stands a noumenon, its hidden meaning, and art, love and mystical experience are the faculties by which the noumenal side of things is glimpsed.

Time as the fourth dimension

His great argument is by analogy. A being that could perceive only a line would experience whatever crossed its line from outside as an event in time, appearing and vanishing. A being of a plane would take a solid passing through its plane for a figure that grows, changes and disappears. So, he argues, our time is an imperfect sense of a fourth dimension of space, and the motion and change we see are our way of perceiving, in sections, a body of four dimensions.

He finds the same ladder among the animals. A snail, he holds, lives in a world of one dimension, feeling only the line of its path, with everything else coming to it as time. A dog or a horse lives in a world of moving planes: the angles and curves of solid things, which shift as the animal moves, appear to it as motion, so that our third dimension is its time. A human being perceives three dimensions and feels the fourth as time; the higher consciousness that mystics describe would perceive it as space, and see whole what we see moment by moment.

The logic of the infinite

Tertium Organum, the third instrument of thought, takes its name from Aristotle's Organon and Bacon's Novum Organum, and claims to be older than both. Their logic, that A is A and cannot be not-A, holds for the finite world of separate things. In the world of the infinite and of causes, he argues, its axioms fail, and if one tries to put the higher logic into words it comes out as an absurdity: A is both A and not-A; everything is all. The absurdity is the sign that the mind has touched the noumenal world, and he gathers the testimony of mystics of many ages, from the Upanishads' that thou art to Plotinus and Boehme, as reports from it.

Eternal recurrence

A New Model of the Universe extends the dimensions further. Beyond the three of space and the fourth, time, the fifth is eternity, in which each moment does not vanish but exists for ever, and the line of time bends into a circle; the sixth is the realisation of all the possibilities that the line of one life leaves unrealised. A life, in this teaching, recurs: when it ends it begins again, and a person lives the same life once more, with the same events, unless something in them has changed.

His novel Ivan Osokin puts the doctrine into a story: a man is granted his life again from his school days, knowing everything, and makes every mistake again, because knowledge without inner change alters nothing. The only hope, as Ouspensky teaches it, is to change in this life, so that the next turn of the circle is not the same.

The tarot as pictures of the inner life

Before he met his teacher he wrote prose poems on the twenty-two trumps of the tarot, reading each card not as a fortune but as a picture of an inner state, and he set them out in a triangle with seven cards on each side and the Fool at its centre. The tarot, as he treats it, is a picture alphabet of the inner life, to be contemplated rather than used to foretell.

The system as he taught it

In his London groups he taught the system he had learned from Gurdjieff, and he began always with the same fact: man, as he is, does not know himself, has no permanent I, and cannot do. There are four states of consciousness: sleep; the waking state, which is really a waking sleep; self-consciousness, which people believe they have and do not; and objective consciousness. The work is to reach the third. Its first method is self-observation, and its key is self-remembering, which he described as a divided attention, an arrow pointing two ways at once, toward the thing observed and back toward the one observing.

He laid special stress on the struggle against the expression of negative emotions, which he held to be useless and to belong to no real centre, and on the study of lying and imagination in oneself. He taught that man is an unfinished being whose further evolution is possible but not automatic, and comes only to the few who make conscious efforts; that such work needs a school, which cannot be invented, but only received from those who know; and that it goes along three lines at once, work on oneself, work with others, and work for the school.