P. D. OuspenskyReviews

Since its original publication in 1949, P. D. Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous has been hailed as the most valuable and reliable documentation of G. I. Gurdjieff's thoughts and universal view. This historic and influential work is considered by many to be a primer of mystical thought as expressed through the work, a combination of Eastern philosophies that had for centuries been passed on orally from teacher to student. ... Ouspensky describes Gurdjieff's teachings in fascinating and accessible detail, providing what has proven to be a stellar introduction to the universal view of both men. In Search of the Miraculous has inspired great thinkers and writers of ensuing spiritual movements, including Marianne Williamson, the highly acclaimed author of A Return to Love and Illuminata. In a new foreword, Williamson shares the influence of Ouspensky's book and Gurdjieff's teachings on the New Thought movement and her own life, providing a contemporary look at a timeless classic. (Amazon.com)

This was the last book of 1915 I read. I kept putting it off because I was sure it would be incredibly boring and all about philosophy. I mean, Ouspensky, right? Surprise!! This was amazing, one of the best. Guess what? It is about time travel! I used to be obsessed with time travel and have read so many time travel novels, and even written some, and even got one published. So I thought I knew all the usual time travel tropes and tricks. But Strange Life of Ivan Osokin is completely original. It’s a completely realistic novel about time travel. This is what time travel would really be like if it were possible, or maybe it even is actually happening constantly.

You know how sometimes the character travels back in time but because of the rules of time travel, or to keep from changing the future, or because of meddling by the super-villains, nothing can be changed? This book is NOT like that. In this story, nothing changes because the protagonist is too stuck in his ways to change, even though that’s the very reason why he traveled back in time to live life again as his younger self. You think you would do things differently if you were fourteen again, but would you really? Why would you, you are the same person you were before. At first I felt very sympathetic to Ivan as he makes the identical mistakes he set out to avoid. Because being in school is so horrible. It’s easy to think if you had a chance to do it all over again you’d be a success this time, but actually it’s a no-win situation and you still wouldn’t want to do your homework. And I felt sympathetic to Ivan as he decided that this time his mother wouldn’t die. It is such an awful and impossible thing to believe, that your mother will ever die, no wonder he still can’t believe it even after he’s already lived through it. Even after he’s longed so much to see his mother again, when he does get to spend time with her, he’s churlish and uncommunicative just like he was the first time around, and he still causes her trouble that (he believes) contributes to her early death.

But it’s hard to maintain sympathy with Ivan as he spirals down through his life. The magician told him he would remember that he had traveled through time as long as he wanted to remember it, and he doesn’t want to remember anymore. Then he meets Zinaida. She’s the reason he wanted to have a second chance, a chance to win her. When we met her the first time, at the very end of their relationship, she seemed sulky and spoiled and to be toying with Ivan. But once I got to see the actual arc of their relationship, everything she did and said made a lot of sense; this was very nicely laid out. I was really just at the edge of my seat waiting to see what would happen when the loop closed. And is this the second time he’s lived through his life, or maybe the third? Can he get out of the loop? Usually, I’m pretty cavalier about spoiling the books of 1915 but I think I’ll pause here, because you probably really want to go out and read this very accessible and short science fiction novel.

I said that The Forged Note was the book of 1915 that made me think the most, but actually it was this one. This book made me think really hard about me and my life and what the hell should I do? You can’t ask for much more than that. Just in case you are too lazy to read Strange Life of Ivan Osokin, I’ll give you the fruits of my labor. Obviously, Ivan is just like me, and possibly you, so I studied his mistakes closely to see how I can avoid them. These are his problems. 1) He daydreams all the time, like me. After becoming a schoolboy again, how does he occupy his mind? By thinking about a made-up universe called Oceanis. Well, naturally. 2) He never talks to anyone about real stuff. Not once does he tell a friend, “Hey, this weird thing is happening to me. I think I traveled through time.” And he never tells Zinaida how he really feels; he just blathers on. 3) Ivan never mends fences with anyone he’s had a fight with. He just assumes they hate him forever and he writes them off. I bet an apologetic letter to his uncle would’ve gone a long way. 4) He cares what other people think about him. He gambles away his last dollar because he’s self-conscious about how he looks to a bunch of rich people. Actually, no one really cares what anyone else does and they’re all completely oblivious because they’re busy thinking about Oceanis or being caught in their loop themselves. So why bother? 5) He’s hella lazy. How about when Zinaida tries to get him a job as a civil servant and he turns it down even though he’s penniless, because he’s a poet. 6) He’s always making plans for the future, or thinking about how he did things wrong in the past. He is in the present zero percent of the time.

That’s the one that really got me, because isn’t making a catalog of your own/Ivan’s mistakes just another way to defer everything to the future or past? This one seems like the real problem, especially in a time travel scenario, which is every scenario really because in regular life you are supposedly traveling from the past into the future but all the time you are only ever in the present. Strange Life of Ivan Osokin makes it clear that everyone is going through their life as a zombie, stuck in the same patterns they’ve always been stuck in, and the only other option is to wake up. So then I got to thinking, is it really a good thing to be woke? Because if you are awake and present, that means being awake and present to a lot of extremely unpleasant experiences. Honestly there are advantages and disadvantages to being a zombie. Ultimately I decided that since being in the present is one of my wife’s very few interests I might as well be there with her since I married her and stuff.

Anyway, that’s enough about me. Another feature of Strange Life of Ivan Osokin is a recurring reference to an English fairy tale which is very haunting; I don’t know if it’s a real fairy tale or if Ouspensky made it up. And there are a few references to an upcoming revolution in Russia that are interesting. And I really like the open-ended nature of the book’s conclusion: The Gurdjieff-type magician has warned Ivan that it’s very easy to get distracted, and you can almost see it about to happen to Ivan. Because on the one hand everything that Ivan thinks he wants is available to him, but on the other hand he knows that it won’t work out and he is doomed to make the same mistakes again unless he becomes a completely different person.

I wonder what he will do? I was really pleased to learn that Ouspensky has a non-fiction treatment of the same material, called A New Model of the Universe.

This book can only be recommended for people with an affinity for Gurdjieff/Ouspensky...otherwise it's pretty boring. Reading this book for the first time verified for me that knowledge is "matter"...it took me 3 years to finish it because I had to sit and emotionally & intellectually digest what I had read---sometimes one paragraph at a time. Upon further re-readings--of this and other books--it flows much more smoothly. And is now more meaningful.

Since its original publication in 1949, In Search of the Miraculous has been hailed as the most valuable and reliable documentation of G. I. Gurdjieff's thoughts and universal view. This historic and influential work is considered by many to be a primer of mystical thought as expressed through the Work, a combination of Eastern philosophies that had for centuries been passed on orally from teacher to student. Gurdjieff's goal, to introduce the Work to the West, attracted many students, among them Ouspensky, an established mathematician, journalist, and, with the publication of In Search of the Miraculous, an eloquent and persuasive proselyte.

"If I know and remember, I shall do everything differently"
By sally tarbox on 30 November 2017

Probably *3.5 stars for this unusual and well-written tale which opens in 1902 Moscow. Ivan Osokin is seeing the girl he loves off at the station; he can't accede to her requests that he accompany her as he's almost broke. And she warns she won't wait for him more than a couple of months. When she finally becomes engaged to another, Osokin is suicidal; he pays a visit to a mystical man in town where he bemoans the fact that he can't live his life over. If he only had his time again, he'd avoid expulsion from school, alienating his rich uncle, bad behaviour in the army and frittering away a life-saving inheritance in casinos. The wizard warns it would all be just the same.. but actions a bit of time travel, and our hero wakens in his boarding school dormitory...
Before long, Osokin is observing "It seems to me that everything repeats itself, not once or twice but scores of times, like the 'Blue Danube' on a barrel organ. And I know it all by heart."
Interesting premise½

Definitely written by a philosopher.

40 years after first reading it I still remember the plot and the depressing point of this novel.

Ivan Osokin is a young man from the pre-revolution Russian upper crust who has managed to squander every advantage that his life circumstance has bestowed upon him. When he finds himself with only 30 kopeks to his name and realizes that he is about to lose the love of a wonderful young woman, in desperation he goes to a magician and begs to be sent back in time for a do-over of the past dozen or so years so he can make some better choices. Part of the bargain is that he will remember that he has been through it all before.

The magician sends him back to his boyhood at boarding school and we follow him as he manages to muck everything up in exactly the same way as before — from expulsion from school, to loss of his military commission and gambling away his inheritance in a drunken evening at the roulette table. He finds himself once again with only 30 kopeks and the loss of his true love.

One more time he presents himself to the magician in his parlor and predictably asks to return to the past so he can make better decisions and have a better outcome. Gradually he begins to realize that no matter how many times he goes back, the result will be the same or possibly worse.

The magician offers a different solution — to choose life, and know that in order to succeed he will have to learn to be less willful and to make certain sacrifices. In the past, he has not appreciated the consequences of his willful actions.

The magician gives him some choices to think about, and as he mills about the streets of Moscow, he has a sudden epiphany: The world would not change one iota if he were not there.

At first I enjoyed Strange Live of Ivan Osokin but then I simply became bored. For him the past, present and future appears to have merged. I just felt confused. How many times did he actually go back to make the same mistakes again and again? What is the big secret he now knows that can help him?

I felt that the way Osokin felt is similar to the feelings of one who is seriously depressed. He believes if he only could go back in time and do things differently his life would be better. And then imagines he's gone back only to make the same mistakes. At the end feeling if the past, present and future hold no choice, what is the point of life?

Reading it changed my perspectives on life! This is perhaps the most profound book I have ever read along with Marcelo Motta's Astral Attack and Defense. Every day was a wonder and each paragraph seemed to bring a whole flurry of thoughts, ideas and insight. The Fourth Way and Thelema are parallel in that both recommend that an aspirant develop all of his/her faculties - athletic, rational/detached/scientific, intuitive/emotional/artistic, and sensual.

Back when I was a callow youth, attending university and living unconsciously, I took a course at the university where this book was assigned as suggested reading. I never did read the book at that time, but when I began to "wake up," I remembered that book and thought it might hold some answers for me. So I read it, and it set me on the path to discovering my Self. It was just the first step on the path, and it doesn't hold all the answers, but it is an eye opener for people who want to think a little deeper about things and wake up from the dream.

This book is a masterpiece. It starts with a question fundamental to our understanding of everything and proceeds to synthesize an explanation through math, logic and mystical experience and concludes with an analysis of religious and esoteric knowledge.

It is by no means light reading and is a work that I will have to read again several times because of the density of the ideas presented. But Ouspensky's intelligence and intellect shine through in this brilliant work and I highly recommend this work to anyone who is seeking knowledge of themselves and the world around them.

When your boss tells you one day that he took and English degree, and loved this book, you may well expect the worst. As a science graduate, I remember the books my English Degree friends used to read. But, I gave this one a go, on the boss' advice. And I am not disappointed. The book tells the tale of a young man who's life just doesn't go the way he wanted, and when given the opportunity to live it all over again by a "magic man", he does so. However, he finds that he is predisposed to make the same decisions over again, resulting in a similar outcome to before. The wonderful elements of the easy style, the historical observations, and the characters make this a fascinating view into the psychology that drives us in our everyday lives. Why we do what we do, and whether we really can change as people. I loved this, as I see a little of myself in Ivan. Highly recommended.

Classic Ouspensky, also try and read Gurdjieff if you can, it will blow your mind!

This book was my first introduction to Ouspensky. Since it was written as a series of lectures it reads very easily, and at 128 pages (my version) it goes quickly. I have no previous background in Ouspensky’s system so I cannot comment on it, I can only offer my impression of this particular book. For all I know the system is amazing, but I did not find the book particularly exciting or enlightening. It did not make me want to read more Ouspensky. While there were many interesting observations concerning the human condition, I found much of the book too systematic and reductionist (i.e. the human machine has 7 different functions, all men are divided into 7 categories, etc.).

One of the points stressed many times throughout the book is the need for “schools” that teach a person how to advance. Without schools a person cannot make any progress (the actual quote is “…one must get rid of the second illusion – that one can get anything by oneself; because by oneself one can get nothing” pg. 38). At first you might think he means you cannot advance without other human contact or ideas (social, academic, reading, etc.) but he means a very specific type of school that teaches the methods in his system. This does not bode well for humanity since I have never heard of any such schools near me.

Mixed in with what I would consider a very western perspective was a smattering of eastern ideas as well as what are now common ideas from self-help psychology. All of this made for parts that I agreed with but have read elsewhere, to parts that simply did not resonate with me. Overall most of the interesting ideas covered in the book have been covered more adequately in other books that I’ve read.½

Not buyin' it. "Tertium Organum" was so much better. Ouspensky should have stuck to re-hashing the arguments of others.

Hold on to your hats with this one. P. D. Ouspensky begins with a problem proposed by Kant--that 'space' and 'time' are simply constructs of consciousness--and runs with it. Boiled down to its barest argument, Tertium Organum suggests that the world we perceive is an artificiality; we cannot perceive the world as it is because our perception is self-limited. Lots of analogies about how two-dimensional beings would perceive three-dimensional objects passing through planes lead Ouspensky to suggest that we fail to understand what we see. His answer? What we perceive as 'time' is actually the movement of fourth-dimensional objects through our plane of existence. It is possible according to Ouspensky to achieve the consciousness required to understand the 'realm of causes,' because the technology exists in our mystical traditions going back millenia. The Fall of Adam and Eve actually marked the imprisonment in Matter of Spirit. We can liberate ourselves with proper training and devotion.

Elaborate bullshit or the key to higher consciousness? Doesn't matter to me so long as it entertains. I loved it. Any book capable of rationally marshalling disparate figures like Hegel, William James, Lao Tzu, Madame Blavatsky, Jacob Boehme, Sufi mystics, the Mahabarata, Plato, and Plotinus can't help but challenge a three-brained being.

excelente

Chapter III - includes "connectedness of everyting in nature".
Chapter V - mechanics of the universe, the "ray of creation" from the Absolute.

Chapter VI - what should our purpose be?

Chapter VII - consciousness - we do not remember ourselves

1949 edition?