I'm not necessarily painting Ouspensky and Gurdjieff with the same brush, in fact I lean strongly towards Ouspensky being positive, and just very unfortunate to have crossed paths with Gurdjieff. They met because Gurdjieff read an article in the newspaper by Ouspensky, and the article referred to Ouspensky as an esotericist, and Gurdjieff lured him in after that...
From A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult
From A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult
Quote:P. D. Ouspensky
Although to most readers Peter Demian Ouspensky is known, if at all, as the most articulate disciple of the enigmatic G.I. Gurdjieff, he was in his own right a thinker of considerable merit, and it is possible that his meeting with that remarkable man was perhaps the worst thing that ever happened to him. After breaking with Gurdjieff in 1924, Ouspensky set himself up in London as a teacher of Gurdjieff’s ideas, disseminating them in a dry, professional manner to the likes of Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, Christopher Isherwood, T.S. Eliot and Algernon Blackwood. The situation may seem strange; but as Ouspensky himself points out in his posthumously published In Search of The Miraculous (1949), an account of his early years with Gurdjieff, by 1917 – two years after their initial meeting in a seedy Moscow café - he had begun to separate the man Gurdjieff from his teaching, finding fault with the former, but maintaining the importance of the latter. Yet, in 1947, just months before his death, brought on by heavy drinking, Ouspensky held a series of talks that have gone down as legendary in the history of “the work”, the name given to Gurdjieff’s peculiar system of “harmonious development”. Returning to a post-war London after sitting out the Blitz in the US, Ouspensky shocked his audience by repudiating the system he had devoted more than twenty-five years to propagating. All of the retinue of “work” ideas: “self-remembering”, “sleep”, our different “I’s”, the fact that we are all “machines”, were denied by the aged and ailing master. Ouspensky rejected the teaching he had given his life to, and advised his listeners to think for themselves. The effect was electrifying. After his death, around which hovered strange circumstances and paranormal events, many of his students, rudderless, eventually found their way to Gurdjieff, the very man that Ouspensky had warned them against and over whom, no doubt, he had lost much sleep. To this day the relationship between the two is the stuff of myth and psychodrama, with Ouspensky cast as a treacherous Judas, stealing his guru’s teaching, and Gurdjieff playing the black magician, power mad and insatiable, intent on dominating all around him.
That Ouspensky made such a profound volte face was not unusual for him. He is, if not, unique, certainly one of the most self-critical and painfully honest, as well as readable, writers on esotericism. Having once adopted Gurdjieff’s austere and unromantic ideas, Ouspensky looked back on his earlier self with some disparagement, calling his Tertium Organum, the book that made his reputation, a weakness. Yet it is this book, more than any other, that communicates the best in Ouspensky: his vital, questing mind and fiery enthusiasm. All of his other works share a certain pessimism, perhaps most obvious in the theme of his single novel Strange Life of Ivan Osokin (1915-1949), which is a working of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence, the idea that we live our lives over and over again. As a child in Moscow, where he was born in 1878, Ouspensky early on had powerful experiences of déjà vu, that strange feeling that “I have been here before”. Today, most clinical psychologists root this in crossed wires in the brain, but Ouspensky would reject such an explanation. To him there was clearly something wrong with our ideas about time.
Like Nietzsche, Ouspensky’s thought swung between the grim vision of an infinite series of himself, eternally making the same mistakes, and the profoundly optimistic counter-weight of the superman which, in Ouspensky’s case, meant a being endowed with a large helping of Bucke’s cosmic consciousness. That Ouspensky had at least a taste of this is clear from his remarkable essay “Experimental Mysticism”. Following William James, Ouspensky engaged in a series of experiments with nitrous oxide. In his little room in St. Petersburg, he inhaled the gas, and more than likely experimented with hashish as well, finding himself thrown into a strange world of living hieroglyphs and weird, inexplicable phenomena. It was his inability to bring back anything concrete from these experiences that led Ouspensky on his quest to find a teaching that could somehow show him the way.
There is good reason to believe that when Ouspensky met Gurdjieff, that “sly man’s” dour doctrine – that man is a machine with only the slimmest possibility of gaining freedom – combined with Ouspensky’s own Romantic world-rejection to push him into an attitude of Stoic resignation. At any rate, he wrote little after working with Gurdjieff, and the last book published in his lifetime, A New Model of the Universe (1931) (which includes “Experimental Mysticism”), is a collection of essays originally written in his pre-Gurdjieff days, re-worked and brought up to date. Many of the chapters deal with themes similar to Tertium Organum: the fourth dimension, the superman, eternal recurrence, and Ouspensky’s own version of the new physics. But through it all runs the idea of esotericism, the notion that behind everyday world, we can find traces of a hidden hand, the influence of esoteric schools, whose teaching offer the only hope of escaping the wheel of life. Ouspensky believed in this idea fiercely, and in his last days, seeing in Gurdjieff a tainted source, he made plans for journeys to Central Asia, the area of the world most likely, he believed, to harbour traces of secret schools.
These would not be his first journeys to the East, before meeting Gurdjieff, Ouspensky had acquired a reputation pre-Revolutionary Moscow and St. Petersburg as a journalist, mostly for his accounts of his search for the miraculous in India, Egypt, Ceylon and Central Asia. Indeed, it is precisely because of his reputation that Gurdjieff had him ensnared. Returning to Moscow after his fruitless search for schools, Ouspensky was astounded to discover a source of the secret teaching right in his own backyard. Yet, while downing glasses of Montrachet in his last, lonely days, Ouspensky often thought nostalgically of his early years in Russia, before he met Gurdjieff, when his lectures on the superman or the fourth dimension would draw thousands of listeners. He would also remember his late night sessions at St. Petersburg’s Stray Dog Café, a meeting place for Symbolist poets and other members of the avant garde, and the place where Ouspensky rubbed shoulders with the likes of Anna Akmahtova. It was the same milieu as that of Briusov and, another writer we will meet shortly, Andrei Bely. Had Ouspensky not cast in his lot with Gurdjieff, there is good reason to believe that he would be spoken of today in the same breath as Berdyaev, Merzhkovsky and Soloviev. As it is, the influence of Tertium Organum on the Russian avant garde has, in recent years, received more attention. Among other painters, Kasimir Malevich was influenced by Ouspensky’s writing on higher space, and even Berdyaev, who was very critical of the occult influence of Rudolf Steiner on the Russian intelligentsia, spoke of Ouspensky as the only theosophical writer worth reading.
The youthful Ouspensky had a poetic soul, a romantic, vulnerable side that comes out in his early writings, like the collection of stories translated as Talks With The Devil (1916-1973). It also appears in one of his earliest books, The Symbolism of the Tarot originally published in Paris in 1911. Combining his ideas on time, consciousness and secret knowledge, this series of poetic prose sketches was later reworked and included as a chapter in A New Model of the Universe. Yet, as some commentators have remarked, it is in striking contrast to his more rigorous, stern dicta on recurrence, sex and the laws of Manu. Perhaps the strict taskmaster of “the work” could not let go of his earlier, more human self.
Like many drawn to the occult tradition, Ouspensky thought little of socialism and other egalitarian movements. Disagreeing with Buck’s democratic view of cosmic consciousness, he argued that the superman would be a product of high culture, not an inevitable advance of the race. Crossing Russia during the Revolution, Ouspensky had an opportunity to consider these ideas. Separated from Gurdjieff by the warring White and Red armies, stranded in the backwater of Ekaterinodar, Ouspensky wrote a series of Letters from Russia, published in A.R. Orage’s journal The New Age. His account of looting, murder and other atrocities perpetrated by the Bolsheviks was sobering reading for many sympathetic to the Soviet experiment. Reaching Constantinople in 1920, Ouspensky never set foot in Russia again. Throughout his years as an exile he maintained a fierce, implacable hatred of bolshevism, seeing in it the most vile example of the “history of crime”, a virulent barbarism intent on overthrowing what was left of western culture. Oustensky however had no love for the czarist regime; in 1905 his beloved sister was arrested as a dissident and locked up in the Boutirsky Prison in Moscow, where she died. It was grim realities like these that drove him to reading works on occultism while working as a journalist on a Moscow newspaper, and led him, eventually, on his long search for the miraculous.