Final Questions and Answers?

Final Questions and Answers? 

[The report for Monday 20 March has already been posted.]

The period of Uranus's passage through the ugly degree of 22 Aries 23, which I discussed last time, ended late Saturday and on Sunday I felt its absence! And was happy about that. On Sunday in Seattle, people were out enjoying beautiful almost-Spring weather in Cal Anderson Park, the day before Spring officially began (I failed to mention the exact time in the report for Monday, it is 3:30a PT | 6:30a ET | 10:30a UT). 

It is more than fascinating that during Uranus's transit of that degree, "an evil comet's tail ruining everything" (to summarize it), I was reading Gary Lachman's "In Search of P. D. Ouspensky" for the second time. Some year I may read it a third time. I recommend it heartily. But it did feel like I was passing through an evil comet's tail. And that comet was Georges I. Gurdjieff. A very strange man, a thrilling and exciting and wonderful man according to Ouspensky himself, yet a man who, as Lachman thinks (and I tend to agree) ruined Ouspensky's life to a degree, taking him away from his true self and true mission into something which finally, in the final few months of his life, Ouspensky renounced. That is, "The Fourth Way," the teaching that we are machines until we wake up, are asleep, need someone and something (an esoteric School and its Masters) to awaken us (namely, G. I. Gurdjieff himself, who was an autocrat and could be very cruel). 

In 1947, a few months before he died, Ouspensky returned to England (from America) where he had a huge following he had built up through lectures years before. There he shocked his devoted students utterly and totally (the final shock in a System which lived on shocks, that is, shocking its students to wake them up). Lachman: 'Every mention of the teaching [by the questioners in his audience], every remark about sleep, mechanicalness, self-remembering, every question couched in the jargon of the system, was thrown back at the questioners with the absurd and unbelievable reply that Ouspensky had no teaching, that he had never taught them anything, and that, in any case, why should they believe anyone who told them they were mechanical? Who said they were asleep? It must have been an excruciating experience, and Ouspensky did not make it easy. He had nothing to teach them, he said. When one student asked, how he could find harmony, Ouspensky replied, "This is your question? It is my question now, and I have no answer." . . . When one asked what was the aim and purpose of esoteric schools, he replied, "Oh, that is a very big thing," and then added:  "Maybe not." . . . Another asked if it was possible to establish contact with a school. Ouspensky said, "No." To the question, What is reality?" he responded, "Nothing, probably." . . . It took Kenneth Walker to ask the question that everyone else was too afraid to ask: "Do you mean, Mr. Ouspensky, that you have abandoned the System?" To this his teacher replied: "There is no System." In his final trump, Ouspensky had out-shockced even his master [Gurdjieff].'

Lachman continues: 'Ouspensky did leave them a few guidelines. It was up to them to decide what they wanted from life. An aim--an ordinary, everyday aim--was essential. And they could rely only on themselves. If Ouspensky's students came away from these meetings in February through June [1947] with anything more than disillusionment and confusion, it was the sense that it was up to them to make a fresh start. When one student asked if it was possible to make efforts by onself, he answered: "Yes, certainly. Only by yourself. Only possible. No other way possible." [This was a huge contradiction of the basic premise of the System that one can make progress only in a group, a School.] And when one asked, "How is it possible to start work?" he replied, "One must know what one wants." It was, it seemed, as easy as that. But Ouspensky had learned that knowing what one wanted was perhaps the most difficult task of all.'

The rest of the story of Ouspensky's final days is fascinating and you might enjoy reading it. As for the question, not mentioned above, as to whether in fact one must rely only on oneself, or on a Higher Power, on G*d or His representatives in humanity, I have my own replies, to be delivered here perhaps soon. That is, my tentative replies, for are not all intellectually formulated replies to such questions tentative? Is it not the individual who, if there is G*d, must discover HIm or Her or It for himself or herself? Tendentious questions, but necessary ones; I defer them; you perhaps already have your own answers. 

--HHH
Monday, March 20, 2017  1:00 AM