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the evening talking to them about the ideas of Tertium Organum . Walker notes that the room, with its uncomfortable chairs, reminded him of the Presbyterian churches of his Scottish childhood, and of the congregation awaiting the arrival of the minister - who would tell them they were all damned. This, in effect, is what Ouspensky was doing. This is what Gurdjieff did to Ouspensky.

    The objection to Ouspensky's view can be stated simply. The basic problem for human beings is to break through to higher levels of energy, to what William James called - in an important essay - 'Vital Reserves'. James started from the recognition that there are certain days on which we feel more alive than on others. Much of the time, 'most of us feel as if a sort of cloud weighed upon us . . . Compared to what we ought to be we are only half awake. ' James recognized that we are, at least, half awake, not fast asleep:

    In some persons this sense of being cut off from their rightful resources is extreme, and we then get the formidable neurasthenic and psychasthenic conditions, with life grown into one tissue of impossibilities, that so many medical books describe.
    Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energises below his maximum , and he behaves below his optimum . In elementary faculty, in coordination, in power of inhibition and control, in every conceivable way, his life is contracted like the field of vision of an hysteric subject - but with less excuse, for the poor hysteric is diseased, while in the rest of us, it is only an inveterate habit - the habit of inferiority to our full self - that is bad.

    He goes on to ask how unusual men manage to escape these limitations, and answers - exactly as Gurdjieff answered:

    Either some unusual stimulus fills them with emotional excitement, or some unusual idea of necessity induces them to make an extra effort of will. Excitements, ideas, and efforts , in a word, are what carry them over the dam.

    He goes on to make an observation that was also the basis of Gurdjieff's 'Work':

    In these 'hyperaesthetic' conditions which chronic invalidism so often brings in its train, the dam has changed its normal place. The slightest functional exercise gives a distress which the patient yields to and stops. In such cases of 'habit-neurosis' a new range of power often comes in consequence of the 'bullying-treatment,' of efforts which the doctor obliges the patient, much against his will, to make. First comes the very extremity of distress, then follows unexpected relief.

    Gurdjieff's basic method was to combat 'habit-neurosis' through a version of the 'bullying treatment' - by forcing his followers to make efforts that brought 'the very extremity of distress', followed by a sudden sense of freedom, as if a strait-jacket had been loosened.
    William James had arrived at these conclusions through unpleasant personal experience. In The Varieties of Religious Experience , he describes how, at the age of 28, he fell into a state of general pessimism about his prospects:

    I went one evening into a dressing-room in the twilight to procure some article that was there; when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up under his chin, and the coarse grey undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them inclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other.