Peter Demianovich Ouspensky was born in Moscow on 5th March, 1878. His mother was an artist, and his father, an officer in the Russian Survey Service, had a keen interest in mathematics. Ouspensky’s own interest in higher mathematics may have been drawn from his background.
Ouspensky seems to have been mischievous as a youth. It is recorded that he was expelled from school for painting graffiti on a wall. He was clearly very bright, and went on to study at Moscow University, where he attended as a ‘free listener’, which meant he could attend lectures but had no right to pass exams. It seems to have done his career as a journalist little harm, and he worked his way up to the editorial offices of the Moscow daily newspaper The Morning.
Beyond a good intellect and the ability to write, there is nothing to distinguish Ouspensky in his early years. By the time he was in his late twenties however, his interest in philosophy and higher mathematics led him to publish his first book, The Fourth Dimension (1909). The book dealt with the nature of time, and drew on the work of the British mathematician Charles Hinton (1853 – 1907), as well as his own interest in esotericism.
This was followed three years later by Tertium Organum, or ‘the third canon of thought’. The title was a reference to the two earlier canons of thought, Aristotle’s Organon and Francis Bacon’s Novum Organon, and it indicated the seriousness of the undertaking. Tertium Organum provided a detailed and almost laborious analysis of the nature of time and space, as well as our relationship to them. As with The Fourth Dimension, Ouspensky drew on his twin interests in higher mathematics and esotericism to make the point that the world as we know it is but a small part of a greater whole, which is largely hidden from us. In Tertium Organum he termed this ‘higher logic’:
‘Higher logic existed before deductive and inductive logic was ever formulated. Higher logic may be called intuitive logic, the logic of infinity, the logic of ecstasy.’
His pursuit of esotericism, or hidden knowledge, led him to travel widely – to England, France, Italy, Egypt, Turkey, Sri Lanka, and then to India. He had intended to travel further – to Burma, Japan, and America – but his plans were interrupted by the First World War. Then, on returning to Russia in 1915, he came across a small group of people gathered around the enigmatic teacher George Gurdjieff (1866 – 1949).
Gurdjieff himself had travelled extensively in search of the same knowledge, and had returned to Moscow with what Ouspensky described as an esoteric teaching which had been ‘entrusted to him by others’. This teaching, later known as ‘The System’, was largely unknown in the West at the time. Ouspensky records that Gurdjieff probably got it from a Sufi school in Kashgar in Chinese Turkestan, but its exact source is unknown.
Ouspensky worked with Gurdjieff from 1915 until 1918, at which point he began to part company with him. He records, in the latter part of In Search of the Miraculous, that he had ceased to understand Gurdjieff, or that perhaps Gurdjieff’s views had changed:
“I perceived that G. was leading us in fact towards the way of religion, of the monastery, and required the observance of all religious forms and ceremonies, there would be of course a motive for disagreeing with this and for going away, even though at the risk of losing direct leadership. And certainly this would not, at the same time, mean that I considered the religious way a wrong way in general. It may even be a more correct way than my way but it is not my way.”
So it was that Ouspensky arrived in London, in 1921, on his own, and began to establish himself as a teacher in his own right. He conducted study groups in London and New York, which were attended by, amongst others, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, and Kenneth Walker. A record of answers to questions put to him were compiled in the book The Fourth Way (1947).
It is claimed that, in his later years, Ouspensky abandoned the System. This is because, when asked by Kenneth Walker whether he had done so, he answered ‘There is no System’. This was confusing to those present, who may not have understood that Ouspensky was employing the psychological method. Whereas logic demands that everything is expressed in clear definitions and statements, the psychological method is intended to provoke insight. An example of the psychological method can be found in Zen. When Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen, put the question ‘What is the Dharma?’ to his four disciples on his deathbed, each of them gave their answer. The last, Huike, bowed deeply and answered ‘There is no Dharma’, to which Bodhidharma replied ‘You are the marrow in my bones’, indicating that he regarded Huike as his successor.
It is likely Ouspensky knew more than he wrote or said. He played the role of the intellectual, and yet he thought little of the intellect as the means to arrive at insight. The ‘miraculous’ Ouspensky sought was not any crude breaking of the laws of nature nor any hallucinatory magic, but of the arrival of new knowledge by means of insight. This is not unlike the Satori, or ‘sudden enlightenment’, of Buddhism. In Buddhist teachings it is made clear this cannot be manufactured, and that the whole of Buddhist teaching is merely a preparation for it. In the terminology of the Fourth Way, this is referred to as the ‘higher emotional centre’. As Ouspensky put it:
‘When you find yourself in a state approaching higher emotional centre, you will be astounded how much you can understand at once – and then you come back to your normal state and you forget it all.’
Ouspensky’s genius was not fully recognised in his lifetime. Those who came closest to this often did so by inference rather than directly. The artist and writer Rom Landau (1899 – 1974), who attended Ouspensky’s study groups in Kensington, London, recorded his impressions in his book God is my Adventure (1935). Landau writes that Ouspensky entered the room and sat before the assembled group:
‘One of the speaker’s first sentences was: ‘None of you here is awake. What you all do is sleep.’ After he had made this remark he stopped abruptly, as though withdrawing from the world of words into his own more comfortable world. His appearance suddenly suggested to me some modern version of Buddha.’
Jim Blackmann
Bath, England
February 2025