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advent of self-consciousness.

    This is a fundamentally Nietzschean view; it springs out of Zarathustra's recognition that the most basic answer lies in 'great health' - which, in turn, depends on stopping ourselves from leaking .
    This is why Gurdjieff told Ouspensky that if he understood everything in his own book, he would be a great teacher.
    Ouspensky's problem was that he had not yet grasped everything in his own book. He had, without knowing it, solved the basic problem of Ivan Osokin: the weakness, the self-pity, the Tchaikovskian melancholy. The basic solution lay in recognizing that they were analogous to the snail's perception of the sunlight, the darkness and the rain. Once the snail has learned that the limits of its shell are not the limits of the universe, it has also taken the most important step towards perceiving that universe as it really is, rather than as a stifling, trivial, petty, personal illusion.
    These insights had thrown Ouspensky's mind into a ferment. He saw threads stretching out from his central idea to all kinds of apparently contradictory notions: Nietzsche's Superman, the message of the New Testament, yoga, the symbolism of the Tarot, dreams and hypnosis, the ideas of Einstein, Eternal Recurrence, mysticism, the importance of sex in the evolutionary scheme . . . The next task was to begin to get this explosion of insights and connections down on paper. And so, even before setting out for his trip to Egypt, India and Ceylon, he had started to write the book that would become A New Model of the Universe , a work that would contain the most important essay he ever wrote: the chapter called 'Experimental Mysticism'. He was still engaged upon this book when he met Gurdjieff.
    Now we can begin to see why, in a certain sense, the meeting with Gurdjieff was Ouspensky's greatest personal disaster. He had already found his own answer, even if he did not know that he knew it. All he had to do was to pursue it, to think about it repeatedly until he had plumbed it to its depths. And at this point he met the man whose philosophy hurled him back into the pessimism of 10 years earlier. For Gurdjieff, man is a machine, a helpless puppet in the hands of fate. Eight years later, a young English doctor named Kenneth Walker would attend a talk by Ouspensky in a dreary room in Kensington, and would record Ouspensky's first words: that man likes to believe that he possesses a real and permanent 'I', whereas in fact he possesses dozens of 'I's', all struggling for possession; he is virtually a 'multiple personality'.

    A man also prides himself on being self-conscious, where as even a short course of self-study will reveal the fact that one is very rarely aware of oneself, and then only fora few fleeting moments. Man believes that he has will, that he can 'do', but this is also untrue. Everything happens in us in the same way that changes in the weather happen. Just as it rains, it snows, it clears up and is fine, so also, within us, it likes or it does not like, it is pleased or it is distressed. We are machines set in motion by external influences, by impressions reaching us from the outside world.

    There is a simple objection to this: it is untrue. That is to say, it carries an accurate observation to a point at which it becomes untrue. The real trouble is that we allow our intellect and senses to operate in vacuo , and not in association with our vital forces, our sense of 'urgency'.
    Now if Ouspensky had been as pessimistic as he sounds, he would not have been giving a lecture. His whole point - and Gurdjieff's - is that recognition of man's lack of freedom is the first step towards achieving some kind of freedom. Man must do this by struggle, by 'work on himself', by self-observation. The problem for Ouspensky's listeners, as Walker and a dozen others have made clear, is that his gloomy outlook communicated itself to his audience, producing the opposite effect to that he would have produced if he had spent