An ISOM series. Ouspensky should have stayed in India (update 2018, again i am unfair: it is perfectly possible to consider a beyond yoga, e.g. a path of the ‘will’, but O didnt find it in g, i fear)
ISOM1a
Since we are doing Bennett, it might be interesting to do the same for ISOM, by Ouspensky (somewhat abbreviated, since this material has been rehashed ad infinitum)>
I RETURNED to Russia in November, 1914., that is, at the begin¬ning of the first world war, after a rather long journey through Egypt, Ceylon, and India. The war had found me in Colombo and from there I went back through England.
When leaving Petersburg at the start of my journey I had said that I was going to “seek the miraculous.” The
“miraculous” is very difficult to define. But for me this word had a quite definite meaning. I had come to the conclusion a long time ago that there was no escape from the labyrinth of contradictions in which we live except by an entirely new road, unlike anything hitherto known or used by us. But where this new or forgotten road began I was unable to say. I already knew then as an undoubted fact that beyond the thin film of false reality there existed another reality from which, for some reason, something separated us. The “miraculous” was a penetration into this unknown reality. And it seemed to me that the way to the unknown could be found in the East. Why in the East? It was difficult to answer this. In this idea there was, perhaps, something of romance, but it may have been the absolutely real conviction that, in any case, nothing could be found in Europe.
On the return journey, and during the several weeks I spent in Lon¬don, everything I had thought about the results of my search was thrown into confusion by the wild absurdity of the war and by all the emotions which filled the air, conversation, and newspapers, and which, against my will, often affected me.
The strange thing about Ouspensky at the beginning is that he could, in a considerable search, find nothing in India. How strange.
In fact he is being set up for the characteristic ‘sufi’ propaganda against Indian spirituality, which takes the form in Gurdjieff of concocting a ‘fourth way’ beyond the others, a fiction that claims to know of a ‘path of will’, very hard to find, etc, etc….
As we gaze over the twentieth century and the careers of those who tangled with Gurdjieff, we notice that while India has produced thousands of yogis, the Gurdjieff so-called path has produced no exemplars whatever.
Ouspensky should have stayed in India, and spared himself the Faust/Mephisto charade with Gurdjieff.
New Man, New Age, New Socialism 