The Strange Life of P. D. Ouspensky Read Online Free PDF Page A

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    It was an instant of unusual freedom, joy and expansion. A second - and the spell of the charm disappeared. It passed like a dream when one tries to remember it. But the sensation was so powerful, so bright and so unusual that I was afraid to move and waited for it to recur. But it did not return, and a moment later I could not say that it had been - could not say whether it was a reality or merely the thought that, looking at the waves, it might be so.
    Two years later, the yellowish waves of the Finnish gulf and a green sky gave me a taste of the same sensation, but this time it was dissipated almost before it appeared.

    Now what has happened to Ouspensky is very clear. The sheer exhilaration of the waves has momentarily lifted his consciousness into an orgasmic sensation of sheer power, enormous health and strength. Our senses normally seem to extend scarcely beyond our bodies; objects seen around us are dim and slightly unreal. But a sudden great effort of will, or a reflection of the external forces of nature, can strengthen the 'intentionality' of perception so that our gaze seems to be a spear thrown from behind the eyes. In such moments, our usual vapid, feeble sense of our own identity vanishes for a moment in a sense of sheer joy. Hence the feeling of 'oneness'. It could be compared to the sensation one might experience if, in a crowd cheering with happiness, one flung one's arms around a total stranger and felt as much love as for one's brother or sister.
    This is basically the 'secret' Ouspensky was looking for. Since he was personally so withdrawn and shy, it must have seemed beyond his grasp. But the sensation his experience left behind was obviously that our senses act as jailers , preventing us from grasping the reality that lies around us.
    This leads us to the starting point of Tertium Organum , a chapter called (rather unpromisingly) 'Subjective and Objective'. What, Ouspensky asks, do we really know about that world 'outside' us? If he could feel that he had become the waves and the ship, how can the usual distinction between subject and object be as 'real' as it seems?
    According to Bishop Berkeley, such a distinction is quite unreal. Our senses are not 'windows'; they are interpreters , and they translate the information that bombards them into terms we can understand. Energy of 16 millionths of an inch strikes our eyes, and our eyes translate it into redness. Energy of 32 millionths of an inch strikes us, and we translate it into violet. Energy of a higher wavelength - ultra-violet, for example - is invisible to us because our senses feel that it is of no use to us. So we do not live in a real world, but in an interpreted world. That tree is 'out there', but for all practical purposes it is inside my head. Berkeley argues that we have no proof of the existence of a world 'out there'; it might all be a delusion, like a film show projected on my eyeballs.
    Kant did his best to rescue philosophy from this uncomfortable position. We do not create the real world, he says, but our senses establish the conditions for the world we see. They are rather like a nightclub doorkeeper who will only let in people who are respectably dressed. And their criterion for respectability, says Kant, is that things have to be dressed in space and time . Nakedness is not allowed.
    But this means that you and I can never know what the clients look like without their clothes on. We can never know the 'things in themselves', as they were before they had to put on dinner jackets and long dresses. So, at any rate, said Kant. And Ouspensky is willing to accept his views on the matter.
    But in the last decades of the nineteenth century, a writer called C.H. Hinton caused a sensation by extending Kant's idea in a most fascinating manner. Very well, says Hinton, our senses act like doorkeepers who force the clientele to dress in a respectable manner. But in that case, it is our senses that make the rule that our world