The Strange Life of P. D. Ouspensky Read Free Page B

designed Hell as a place where human beings can relax and enjoy themselves. He believes that the aim of life is happiness, good fellowship and artistic enjoyment. Understandably, religious people strike him as cranks; so do philosophers and scientists and all human beings driven by an obscure craving to evolve. Shaw argues that the purpose of the 'Life Force' is to create Intelligence, a brain through which Life can become conscious of its own purposes, so that it can pursue these purposes in the full light of consciousness. Nothing can satisfy the highest type of human being except to help life in its struggle to evolve.
    In the second of the Talks with a Devil , the story called 'The Benevolent Devil', Ouspensky develops ideas that are strikingly similar to Shaw's. He describes a visit to the caves of Ellora, in Northeast Bombay state, which is followed by a dream in which he meets the Devil (now spelt with a capital D) in the temple of Kailas, and they resume the conversation that was broken off in the previous story.
    The Devil begins by explaining that, as far as he is concerned, 'this' world is the only reality, and there is nothing beyond it. 'The kingdom of matter is eternal.' Then he explains that there are two kinds of human beings: one, the descendants of animals, who live entirely on the material plane, and 'whose lives consist of harbouring grudges and trying to get out of difficulties by burdening others with them', and two, the descendants of Adam and Eve, who suffer from 'religious mania', and believe in absurd ideals. He goes on to explain how he seduced Adam and Eve into materialism by giving them large quantities of a delicious fruit which they liked so much that they began to eat it three times a day. They became so obsessed by this fruit that they forgot all their 'imaginary ideals'. Then they began to quarrel, and when Eve left Adam, he found himself three wives from a nearby tribe, while Eve took a lover. And so the Fall began . . .
    Unfortunately, the descendants of Adam and Eve have never lost their vision of the imaginary ideal and it takes a whole army of devils to prevent them from backsliding into virtue.
    The Devil now tells the story of a young man called Leslie White, to whom Ouspensky has introduced a Sinhalese yogi. After a long talk with the yogi, Leslie decides to forgo his dinner - he is not really hungry anyway - and to spend the evening reading some books that have arrived that morning. Watched anxiously by his personal little demon, Leslie settles down in an armchair with a weak whisky and soda. As soon as he becomes absorbed in the world of the books, the demon loses sight of him; Leslie seems to vanish into thin air. This, Ouspensky realizes, is because 'his whole being was immersed in the world of ideas, and material reality did not exist for him'.

    So that is the secret, I thought. To get away from reality means to get away from the devil, to become invisible to him. This . . . signifies, in reverse, that people of dull reality, practical, workaday people, in general all ordinary sober people, belong absolutely and completely to the devil . . . To be frank, I was delighted by this discovery.

    Love, it seems, is another way in which the demon can 'lose' his prey, for when a person is romantically in love, the feeling surrounds him like a wall, and he becomes invisible . . .
    The demon servant now begins trying to seduce Leslie back to laziness and self-indulgence. To dull his senses, he puts him out an unusually large and tasty breakfast. Leslie is unable to resist it and his sense of latent possibilities collapses . . .
    Later that day he goes to tea at the house of Lady Gerald, and there he sees, for the second time, a girl called Margaret, to whom he is powerfully attracted. She obviously feels the same. He begins to tell her about the old yogi and she understands him.

    Leslie suddenly understood that if he could take the two steps which separated him from Margaret and then take