The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution by P. D. Ouspensky

Product Description

Studies man in view of what he may become. Describes how a man must work simultaneously on his knowledge and his being to find inner unity.
Product Details

* Amazon Sales Rank: #87942 in Books
* Published on: 1973-11-12
* Released on: 1973-11-12
* Number of items: 1
* Binding: Paperback
* 144 pages

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap
Studies man in view of what he may become. Describes how a man must work simultaneously on his knowledge and his being to find inner unity.
Customer Reviews

Very well laid out introduction to the 4'th Way5
This is a great little book that offers a surprising amount of insight into the spiriual path. The book is written before Ouspensky published his book In Search of the Miraculous, which goes into much more detail, but this book has so many little gems that it is worth every penny spent. To me Ouspensky is more accessible than reading Gurdjieff directly and gives a very good overview of the 4'th way teaching.

The Wrong Path1
I don't see what purpose this book serves. Ouspensky is the greatest occult writer the modern world has produced, but this little book has nothing in it that isn't in In Search of the Miraculous; and in any event, the books by Ouspensky that matter are the ones that have nothing to do with Gurdjieff.

The Gurdjieff work is a hundred miles wide and one foot deep. Just deep enough for those who can't swim to drown in, as Ouspensky almost did. The work isn't without value; many of Gurdjieff's ideas are basically correct, but everything he knew can be found in superior form in other places. And all of Gurdjieff's ideas are distortions of things he got from other places. He wasn't sophisticated enough to tell the good from the bad, and he mixed wisdom and foolishness together in a salad of roughly equal parts. Much of what Gurdjieff taught, such as the necessity of group work or self-observation as endless toil, is the opposite of truth. Gurdjieff was a man who asked the right questions, but got all the answers wrong. Partly because he was a second-rate mystic with a second-rate mind, and partly because he was like all gurus: he had a deep-seated need to manipulate others and take financial advantage of them. I have seen his type repeatedly and known some of them personally. They are all the same. They take bits and pieces of other people's ideas and use them to impress the gullible. They have an amazing recall and ability to spout things they pick up here and there as if they are original.

Ouspensky was able to separate what little good there was in Gurdjieff from the little con man himself, and put it into his own superior version of the "Gurdjieff work" but grew too attached to the ideas before finally rejecting them for the ego-inflating trap they are.

It is Ouspensky's own work that is of serious interest, but really only parts of it, mainly his thinking on spatial dimensions. It is a tragedy of epic proportions that Ouspensky abandoned his real work for the shallow occultism of the dubious Gurdjieff, and it doesn't speak well of Ouspensky's more mystical side. But that isn't the side of Ouspensky that will stand the test of time.

To this day, his two books Tertium Organum and New Model of the Universe are at the cutting edge of human thought. They show the real direction that our conceptions of space and time should take, not the mathematically correct but logically ridiculous direction physics has taken. And yet, no doubt largely because of his association with the little Armenian con man, the enormous importance of Ouspensky's work is largely forgotten by all but a few.

Those two books show how to overcome the paradoxes of not just physics, but of philosophy. Nothing like them exists, or has ever existed. If you understand his ideas, their truth cannot be denied on any level. Unlike the endless double-bind prison that constitutes the "thought" of the "fourth way", the essays in those two books can change the way you perceive the world in the most fundamental way imaginable. But they are beyond both the reach and grasp of people with no more intelligence or common sense than occult disciples, which is why the people most likely to encounter them get very little from them.

To his eternally recurring credit, Ouspensky abandoned and renounced the Gurdjieff system late in life, realizing at last that it was a dead end, a dangerous distraction. It is ironic that Ouspensky is remembered mostly for his book on Gurdjieff, which is the least of his works and the very thing that keeps the Gurdjieff movement going. Indeed, much of the better stuff people tend to give Gurdjieff credit for was, in fact, Ouspensky all along. Without Ouspensky to make his ideas semi-coherent, there never would have been a Gurdjieff movement. It would have died with Gurdjieff.

In any event, it has been noticed by too few that many of the ideas credited to Gurdjieff, such as the antiquity of the Sphinx, for example, are mentioned in Ouspensky's books long before Gurdjieff professed them, in altered form, later on. And Gurdjieff himself said he would beg Ouspensky to be his teacher if Ouspensky "understood" his own books! From this we can gather that Gurdjieff read Ousepensky's early classics, admired them, and very likely appropriated many of Ouspensky's own ideas, only to regurgitate them back at their originator later on, as part of Gurdjieff's own admittedly "stolen" hodgepodge of ideas. No wonder Ouspensky was so impressed with him.

My recommendation is to read Ouspensky's two early classics, Tertium Organum and New Model of The Universe, and to stay away from Gurdjieff's poison until you are far enough advanced not be be seduced by it.

Which "I" is me?5
My first reading of this book was like a casting off of "dogmatic slumber" for me. Never had I read a work that laid out so very clearly and precisely what is required to work upon ourselves and begin to live intentionally in the world. This is not only the first book to provide someone interested in the Gurdjieffian 4th Way, it's a pivotal work for anyone demanding more of themselves and life than what is provided by alleged exoteric authorities. There are more tools for change in this small book than in many massive tomes offering similar tools for self growth and change. Highly recommended.