The Strange Life of P. D. Ouspensky Read Free

Dowson and Verlaine drinking themselves to death on absinthe, of W.B. Yeats daydreaming of fairyland because he detests the real world. It is also the attitude of Goncharov's Oblomov, unable to arouse himself to get out of bed, and of Gogol's landowner Manilov, whose fantasies of fame and fortune 'grew so lively that eventually he could not even follow them himself'. Amusingly enough, Ouspensky compares the Hague peacemakers to Gogol's Manilov - a classic example of the pot calling the kettle black.
    Ouspensky goes on to meditate that he would like to print his true thoughts about the Hague Conference, but knows that they would only land him in jail. And even if they got into print, nobody would read them. 'What is the use of attempting to expose lies when people like them and live by them? It is their own affair; but I am tired of lying . . .' And so he turns back to his books on magic and Atlantis . . . All of which makes it very clear that even in his late twenties, Ouspensky was still a rather ineffectual romantic who blamed the world for his own shortcomings.
    We know little of these years except that Ouspensky attended meetings of the Theosophical Society and travelled widely as a journalist. In his introduction to a translation of Ouspensky's Talks with a Devil , J.G. Bennett writes:

    Little is known of this period of his life, and I can report only the episodes I heard from him in the course of conversations. He was a successful journalist working on the leading Russian papers, but more often as a free lance. He travelled in Europe and the United States writing articles for St Petersburg papers between 1908 and 1912.

    (St Petersburg may here be a slip for Moscow.)
    It was in 1912 that Ouspensky achieved his ambition to go to India with an open commission to write articles for three Russian newspapers. He proceeded via London, and there made an acquaintance who later proved to be extremely valuable - A.R. Orage, a charismatic socialist who was the editor of one of the most widely read magazines of the period, The New Age . Promising Orage to send him some contributions, Ouspensky then travelled on to Egypt, where he was deeply fascinated by the Sphinx, then to India, where he met some of the outstanding yogis of his time, including Aurobindo. He was not impressed by any of them. He explained afterwards that he was looking for 'real knowledge' and had found only holy men who may have achieved liberation for themselves but could not transmit their methods to others. He also spent some time at Adhyar inMadras, the headquarters of the Theosophical Society, of which he had been a member since 1906. In later years he liked to tell the story of the 'caste system' at Adhyar. On the ground floor were all the hangers-on and undistinguished visitors. The second floor was reserved for well-wishers who gave their money and support to the society. The top floor, with a large open roof, was the home of the esoteric group, the real initiates of Theosophy. Ouspensky recalled with relish that he was at once admitted to the esoteric group in spite of his no longer being a member of the Theosophical Society and his open criticism of their founder, Helena Blavatsky. He asserted that he found nothing at Adhyar that made him wish to stay. According to J.G. Bennett:

    He went on to Ceylon, which he found more congenial, and he met several of the more famous bhikkus , and satisfied himself that the old techniques of Buddhism were still being used in Ceylon. But once again he felt no urge to cut himself off from the West and become a monk. He wrote later that he was not interested in a way that would isolate him from the Western world, which held the key to the future of mankind. This did not mean that he doubted the existence of 'schools', as he called them, in India and Ceylon, but that these schools no longer had the significance that they used to have in the past. He also added that he found that most of these schools relied upon religious