Ouspenskian cosmology

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Ouspenskian cosmology is the picture of the universe that P. D. Ouspensky set out in In Search of the Miraculous, his reconstruction of G. I. Gurdjieff’s oral teaching, and extended in his own A New Model of the Universe. It is less a freestanding theory than a frame: a diagram of where the human being stands in a graded order of worlds, and of why, on this account, the ordinary person is unable to move. Ouspensky brought to it the equipment of a Russian philosopher of mathematics and higher dimensions — he had already written Tertium Organum before he met Gurdjieff in Moscow in 1915 — and it is largely his habit of setting things in ranks that gives the scheme its diagrammatic clarity.

The central image is the Ray of Creation — a descent from the Absolute, through all the worlds, the stars taken as one, the sun, the planets taken together, the earth, and the moon. Each stage is a world subject to more laws than the one above it, and so further from the freedom of the source. The teaching fixed this in a series of numbers, each world labeled by the orders of law that govern it, the count doubling at every step: World 1, the Absolute; 3, all worlds; 6, all suns; 12, the sun; 24, the planets; 48, the earth; 96, the moon. The number is the burden — the fewer the laws, the nearer the will of the Absolute; the more the laws, the greater the mechanicalness and the further from that will. The human being lives on the earth, World 48, near the foot of the ray, under forty-eight orders of mechanical law; the moon, World 96, is the densest, most mechanical terminus of the chain.

Two forces govern every event on this ladder. The Law of Three states that nothing happens without the meeting of three forces — active, passive, and a third, reconciling force that the mind tends to overlook; the worlds of the ray were held to be generated as these three recombine on the way down. The Law of Seven states that no process runs in a straight line: every developing impulse, like the notes of a musical octave, passes through two points — the intervals mi–fa and si–do — where it falters and bends, and will veer from its aim unless a fresh shock is supplied at exactly the right place. The ray itself was read as one descending octave, each world a note, which is what binds the cosmology to this law. In Gurdjieff’s presentation through Ouspensky the two laws are drawn together as a single figure, the enneagram — a circle divided into nine, the inscribed triangle 3-6-9 standing for the Law of Three and the periodic figure 1-4-2-8-5-7 for the Law of Seven. Gurdjieff is reported to have called it a universal symbol in which all knowledge could be included. (This is the Fourth Way enneagram of process, not the later personality-typing diagram that borrowed the name.)

From the two laws the teaching elaborated a “table of hydrogens,” a single scale ranking every substance and influence by density — including the air a person breathes and the impressions that reach the senses — as a kind of food carrying energy of a definite measure, its numbers echoing the worlds of the ray. A human being, on this scheme, takes in three foods: ordinary food, air, and impressions. Each is “digested” as its own octave, the body a chemical factory drawing finer matters from coarser. The scheme extended outward as well: organic life on earth was cast as a transmitting station, a sensitive film over the planet that catches the influences descending from the higher worlds and passes them down the ray. The chain’s terminus carries a stranger claim — that the moon, a young and growing world at the bottom of the ray, “feeds” on organic life, the energies released by living and dying organisms nourishing its growth. To cease being food for the moon, on this account, is part of what the work is for.

What practitioners took from the scheme was a diagnosis. If a human being is a machine run by laws proper to a low rung of the ray, then ordinary effort cannot lift the machine, and what is needed is a precise interruption — the additional shock that the Law of Seven says a stalled process requires, supplied in the inner work as a “conscious shock.” The cosmology and the discipline of self-remembering are meant to be one thing seen twice: the map of the worlds is also the reason the inner work has to take the form it does. The practice itself belongs to the Fourth Way; here it is only the hinge between the diagram and the discipline.

Ouspensky’s own contribution sharpened around time. Before he met Gurdjieff he had argued, in Tertium Organum (1912), that higher consciousness would apprehend time as a further dimension. In A New Model of the Universe (1931) — a volume of essays ranging across the fourth dimension, the tarot, the superman, and recurrence — he pressed the idea into a full doctrine: the ordinary line of time, before–now–after, is crossed by a “line of eternity” and a further dimension beyond it, so that, on his account, six-dimensional space is reality, the world as it is. Bound to this he set a doctrine of recurrence — that at death a life is not continued forward but relived from the start, over and over in the same form, a loop he had already dramatized in his early novel Strange Life of Ivan Osokin — and that escape from the repetition is the real stake of the work.

How much of the cosmology is Gurdjieff and how much is Ouspensky’s ordering of it is genuinely hard to settle, since Gurdjieff left no plain exposition and Ouspensky was the one who set it in ranks. That circumstance is partly biography: the two parted once at Essentuki in 1918, during the Russian upheaval, and broke finally in January 1924, in London, when Ouspensky told a circle of senior pupils that he would teach independently, not from personal quarrel but, as he put it, from a need not to confuse two schools of knowledge. He went on teaching the system on his own until his death in 1947, which is exactly why it reaches the present mainly in his ordered, diagrammatic form. Scholarship treats the claimed ancient pedigree with caution, finding in the scheme the marks of its own moment — the period’s fascination with hidden dimensions and esoteric science — rather than a recovered antiquity. It stands at the end of a long line of such descents — the Neoplatonic procession of all things from the One most clearly behind it — and the kinship has often been noticed. But where those older systems placed a soul, Ouspensky’s diagram places a machine; the borrowing is of shape, not of substance, and the construction is wholly of the twentieth century.

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