by Ouspensky
I have preserved in my memory one episode. It happened at one of the repetitions of this lecture on the structure of matter in connection with the mechanics of the universe. The lecture was read by P., a young engineer belonging to G.'s Moscow pupils, whom I have mentioned.
I arrived when the lecture had already begun. Hearing familiar words I decided that I had already heard this lecture and therefore, sitting down in a comer of the large drawing room, I smoked and thought of something else. G. was there too.
"Why did you not listen to the lecture?" he asked me after it was over.
"But I have already heard it," I said. G. shook his head reproachfully. And quite honestly I did not understand what he expected from me, why I ought to listen for a second time to the same lecture.
I understood only much later, when lectures were over and when I tried to sum up mentally all I had heard. Often, in thinking a question over, I remembered quite distinctly that it had been spoken of at one of the lectures. But what precisely had been said I could unfortunately by no means always remember and I would have given a great deal to hear it once more.
Nearly two years later, in November, 1917, a small party of us consisting of six people, among whom was G., was living on the Black Sea shore twenty-five miles north of Tuapse, in a small country house more than a mile from the nearest habitation. One evening we sat and talked. It was already late and the weather was very bad, a northeast wind was blowing which brought now rain, now snow, in squalls.
I was thinking just of certain deductions from the 'table of hydrogens,' chiefly about one inconsistency in this diagram as compared with another of which we heard later. My question referred to hydrogens below the normal level. Later on I will explain exactly what it was I asked and what, long afterwards, G. answered- 1A New Model of the Universe, ch. 8, "Experimental Mysticism"
This time he did not give me a direct answer.
"You ought to know that," he said, "it was spoken of in the lectures in St. Petersburg. You could not have listened. Do you remember a lecture that you did not want to hear, saying you knew it already? But what was said then is precisely what you ask about now." After a short silence he said: "Well, if you now heard that somebody was giving the same lecture at Tuapse, would you go there on foot?"
"I would," I said.
And indeed, though I felt very strongly how long, difficult, and cold the road could be, at the same time I knew that this would not stop me.
G. laughed.
"Would you really go?" he asked. "Think—twenty-five miles, darkness, snow, rain, wind."
"What is there to think about?" I said. "You know I have walked the whole way more than once, when there were no horses or when there was no room for me in the cart, and for no reward, simply because there was nothing else to be done. Of course I would go without a word if somebody were going to give a lecture on these things at Tuapse."
"Yes," said G., "if only people really reasoned in this way. But in reality they reason in exactly the opposite way. Without any particular necessity they would face any difficulties you like. But on a matter of importance that can really bring them something they will not move a finger. Such is human nature. Man never on any account wants to pay for anything; and above all he does not want to pay for what is most important for him. You now know that everything must be paid for and that it must be paid for in proportion to what is received. But usually a man thinks to the contrary. For trifles, for things that are perfectly useless to him, he will pay anything. But for something important, never. This must come to him of itself.
"And as to the lecture, what you ask was actually spoken of in St. Petersburg. If you had listened then, you would now understand that there is no contradiction whatever between the diagrams and that there cannot be any."
But to return to St. Petersburg.
In looking back now I cannot help being astonished at the speed with which G. transmitted to us the principal ideas of his system. Of course a great deal depended upon his manner of exposition, upon his astonishing capacity for bringing into prominence all principal and essential points and for not going into unnecessary details until the principal points had been understood.
After the 'hydrogens' G. at once went further.
"We want to 'do,' but" (he began the next lecture) "in everything we do we are tied and limited by the amount of energy produced by our
organism. Every function, every state, every action, every thought, every emotion, requires a certain definite energy, a certain definite substance.
"We come to the conclusion that we must 'remember ourselves.' But we can 'remember ourselves' only if we have in us the energy for 'self-remembering.' We can study something, understand or feel something, only if we have the energy for understanding, feeling, or studying.
"What then is a man to do when he begins to realize that he has not enough energy to attain the aims he has set before himself?
"The answer to this is that every normal man has quite enough energy to begin work on himself. It is only necessary to learn how to save the greater part of the energy we possess for useful work instead of wasting it unproductively.
"Energy is spent chiefly on unnecessary and unpleasant emotions, on the expectation of unpleasant things, possible and impossible, on bad moods, on unnecessary haste, nervousness, irritability, imagination, daydreaming, and so on. Energy is wasted on the wrong work of centers; on unnecessary tension of the muscles out of all proportion to the work produced; on perpetual chatter which absorbs an enormous amount of energy; on the 'interest' continually taken in things happening around us or to other people and having in fact no interest whatever; on the constant waste of the force of 'attention'; and so on, and so on.
"In beginning to struggle with all these habitual sides of his life a man saves an enormous amount of energy, and with the help of this energy he can easily begin the work of self-study and self-perfection.
"Further on, however, the problem becomes more difficult. Having to a certain extent balanced his machine and ascertained for himself that it produces much more energy than he expected, a man nevertheless comes to the conclusion that this energy is not enough and that, if he wishes to continue his work, he must increase the amount of energy produced.
"The study of the working of the human organism shows this to be quite possible.
"The human organism represents a chemical factory planned for the possibility of a very large output. But in the ordinary conditions of life the output of this factory never reaches the full production possible to it, because only a small part of the machinery is used which produces only that quantity of material necessary to maintain its own existence. Factory work of this kind is obviously uneconomic in the highest degree. The factory actually produces nothing—all its machinery, all its elaborate equipment, actually serve no purpose at all, in that it maintains only with difficulty its own existence.
"The work of the factory consists in transforming one kind of matter into another, namely, the coarser matters, in the cosmic sense, into finer ones. The factory receives, as raw material from the outer world, a number of coarse 'hydrogens' and transforms them into finer hydrogens by means of a whole series of complicated alchemical processes. But in the ordinary conditions of life the production by the human factory of the finer 'hydrogens,' in which, from the point of view of the possibility of higher states of consciousness and the work of higher centers, we are particularly interested, is insufficient and they are all wasted on the existence of the factory itself. If we could succeed in bringing the production up to its possible maximum we should then begin to save the fine 'hydrogens.' Then the whole of the body, all the tissues, all the cells, would become saturated with these fine 'hydrogens' which would gradually settle in them, crystallizing in a special way. This crystallization of the fine 'hydrogens' would gradually bring the whole organism onto a higher level, onto a higher plane of being.
"This, however, cannot happen in the ordinary conditions of life, because the 'factory
' expends all that it produces.
" 'Learn to separate the fine from the coarse'—this principle from the 'Emerald Tablets of Hermes Trismegistus' refers to the work of the human factory, and if a man learns to 'separate the fine from the coarse,' that is, if he brings the production of the fine 'hydrogens' to its possible maximum, he will by this very fact create for himself the possibility of an inner growth which can be brought about by no other means. Inner growth, the growth of the inner bodies of man, the astral, the mental, and so on, is a material process completely analogous to the growth of the physical body. In order to grow, a child must have good food, his organism must be in a healthy condition to prepare from this food the material necessary for the growth of the tissues. The same thing is necessary for the growth of the 'astral body'; out of the various kinds of food entering it, the organism must produce the substances necessary for the growth of the 'astral body.' Moreover, the 'astral body' requires for its growth the same substances as those necessary to maintain the physical body, only in much greater quantities. If the physical organism begins to produce a sufficient quantity of these fine substances and the 'astral body' within it becomes formed, this astral organism will require for its maintenance less of these substances than it required during its growth. The surplus from these substances can then be used for the formation and growth of the 'mental body' which will grow with the help of the same substances that feed the 'astral body,' but of course the growth of the 'mental body' will require more of these substances than the growth and feeding of the 'astral body.' The surplus of the substances left over from the feeding of the 'mental body' will go to the growth of the fourth body. But in all cases the surplus will have to be very large. All the fine substances necessary for the growth and feeding of the higher bodies must be produced within the physical organism, and the physical organism is able to produce them provided the human factory is working properly and economically.
"All the substances necessary for the maintenance of the life of the organism, for psychic work, for the higher functions of consciousness and the growth of the higher bodies, are produced by the organism from the food which enters it from outside
"The human organism receives three kinds of food
1. The ordinary food we eat
2. The air we breathe
3. Our impressions
"It is not difficult to agree that air is a kind of food for the organism But in what way impressions can be food may appear at first difficult to understand We must however remember that, with every external im pression, whether it takes the form of sound, or vision, or smell, we receive from outside a certain amount of energy, a certain number of vibrations, this energy which enters the organism from outside is food Moreover, as has been said before, energy cannot be transmitted without matter If an external impression brings external energy with it into the organism it means that external matter also enters which feeds the organism in the full meaning of the term
"For its normal existence the organism must receive all three kinds of food, that is, physical food, air, and impressions The organism cannot exist on one or even on two kinds of food, all three are required But the relation of these foods to one another and their significance for the organism is not the same The organism can exist for a comparatively long time without a supply of fresh physical food Cases of starvation are known lasting for over sixty days, when the organism lost none of its vitality and recovered very quickly as soon as it began to take food Of course starvation of this kind cannot be considered as complete, since in all cases of such artificial starvation people have taken water Nevertheless, even without water a man can live without food for several days Without air he can exist only for a few minutes, not more than two or three, as a rule a man dies after being four minutes without air Without impressions a man cannot live a single moment If the flow of impressions were to be stopped in some way or if the organism were deprived of its capacity for receiving impressions, it would immediately die. The flow of impressions coming to us from outside is like a driving belt communicating motion to us. The principal motor for us is nature, the surrounding world. Nature transmits to us through our impressions the energy by which we live and move and have our being If the inflow of this energy is arrested, our machine will immediately stop working Thus, of the three kinds of food the most important for us is impressions, although it stands to reason that a man cannot exist for long on impressions alone Impressions and air enable a man to exist a little longer Impressions, air, and physical food enable the organism to live to the end of its normal term of life and to produce the substances necessary not only for the maintenance of life, but also for the creation and growth of higher bodies.
"The process of transforming the substances which enter the organism into finer ones is governed by the law of octaves.
"Let us take the human organism in the form of a three-story factory. The upper floor of this factory consists of a man's head; the middle floor, of the chest; and the lower, of the stomach, back, and the lower part of the body.
HEAD
CHEST
BACK AND LOWER PART OF THE BODY
Fig. 25
"Physical food is H768, or la, sol, fa of the third cosmic octave of radiations. This 'hydrogen' enters the lower story of the organism as 'oxygen' do 768.
" 'Oxygen' 768 meets with 'carbon' 192 which is present in the organism. From the union of O768 and C192 is obtained N384. N384 is the next note re.
О
Note: "Carbons" which are present in the organism are marked Fig. 2j
'Re 384 which becomes 'oxygen' in the next triad meets with 'carbon' 96 in the organism and together with it produces a new 'nitrogen' 192 which is the note mi 192.
Continuation of the digestion of food (H768) in the organism. Fig. 28
"As it is known from the law of octaves mi cannot pass independently into fa in an ascending octave; an 'additional shock' is necessary. If an 'additional shock' is not received the substance mi 192 cannot by itself pass into the full note fa.
"At the given place in the organism "where mi 192 ought, apparently, to come to a stop there enters the 'second food'—air, in the form of do 192, that is, mi, re, do of the second cosmic octave of radiations. The note do possesses all the necessary semitones, that is, all the energy necessary for the transition to the next note, and it gives as it were a part of its energy to the note mi which has the same density as itself. The energy of do gives mi 192 force enough, while uniting with 'carbon' 48 already in the organism, to pass into 'nitrogen' 96. 'Nitrogen' 96 will be the note fa.
The entrance of air (H192) into the organism and the "shock" which air gives in the interval mi-fa of the food octave.
Fig. 29
"Fa 96 by uniting with 'carbon' 24 present in the organism passes into 'nitrogen' 48—the note sol.
С y>-U
V4 N
-/sol )
уму
ffa
. A 96 J
Continuation of the food octave, transition of products of nutrition into sol 48.
Fig. 30
"The note sol 48 by uniting with 'carbon' 12 present in the organism passes into 'nitrogen' 24—la 24.
С N = 0
{ 12 k_
VsoTN 4'V
ЛГу
24/ N
Continuation of the food octave, transition of products of nutrition into la 24.
Fig. 31
"La 24 unites with 'carbon' 6 present in the organism and is transformed into 'nitrogen' 12, or si 12. Si 12 is the highest substance produced in the organism from physical food with the help of the 'additional shock' obtained from the air.
N = 0 Г fi i с
/"ia—
7$iS
Continuation of the food octave, transition of the products of nutrition into si 12,
Fig. 32"Do 192 (air) entering the middle story of the factory in the character of 'oxygen' and giving part of its energy to mi 192 unites in its turn at a certain place with 'ca
rbon' 48 present in the organism and passes into re 96.
The beginning of the digestion of air in the organism.
Fig. зз
"Re 96 passes into mi 48 with the help of 'carbon' 24 and with this the development of the second octave comes to a stop. For the transition of mi into fa, an 'additional shock' is necessary, but at this point nature has not prepared any 'additional shock' and the second octave, that is, the air octave, cannot develop further and in the ordinary conditions of life it does not develop further.
с ^miN N
x2 £
Уге N = 0
96
lontinuation of the air octave in the organisn Fig. 34
"The third octave begins with do 48. "Impressions enter the organism in the form of 'oxygen' 48, that is, la, sol, fa of the second cosmic octave Sun-Earth.
"Do 48 has sufficient energy to pass into the following note but at that place in the organism where do 48 enters, the 'carbon' 12 necessary for this is not present. At the same time do 48 does not come into contact with mi 48 so that it can neither itself pass into the next note nor give part of its energy to mi 48.
Entry of impressions into the organism, Fig. 35
"Under normal conditions, that is, the conditions of normal existence, the production of the fine matters by the factory at this point comes to a stop and the third octave sounds as do only. The highest substance produced by the factory is si 12 and for all its higher functions the factory is able to use only this higher matter.