Beelzebub's grandson

Gary Lachman's book "In search of P.D. Ouspensky" is a biography of the Russian occultist Ouspensky, whose life took an unexpected turn when he met the Greek-Armenian G. I. Gurdjieff, a mysterious spiritual teacher with a shadowy background and colourful disposition.

A turn for the worse, if we are to believe Lachman...

The fateful meeting between Ouspensky and "G" took place in the Russian capital of St. Petersburg (or Petrograd) in 1915. Ouspensky was a successful author and lecturer on various arcane subjects, and had at one point been associated with the Theosophists. He was also a journalist. Ouspensky had travelled extensively in the East, searching for "schools" of esoteric wisdom. By contrast, Gurdjieff was virtually unknown, but had somehow managed to assemble a small group of followers in Moscow. Ouspensky was impressed by Gurdjieff's teachings, later known as The Fourth Way or The Work. He devoted the remainder of his life teaching and practicing it. The best introduction to Gurdjieff's system is still Ouspensky's book "In search of the miraculous".

To make a very long story much shorter, Gurdjieff's message sounds like a strange form of Buddhism combined with techniques similar to encounter therapy. Humans are said to be "machines" and "asleep", and the goal is to wake them up. An awakened human being will develop a kind of immortal soul and miraculous powers, while most humans will simply perish. Gurdjieff even suggested that spiritually unenlightened humans will become food for the Moon! The Fourth Way strikes me as a bleak and pessimistic philosophy, and I frankly never understood why anybody would want to sign up.

Both Gurdjieff and Ouspensky were forced to leave Russia after the Bolshevik revolution, eventually finding their ways to the West. Ouspensky settled in Britain and later in the United States. He returned to Britain shortly before his death in 1947. Gurdjieff stayed in France, somehow managed to survive the Nazi occupation, and died in 1949. Still today, various Fourth Way groups (both official and unofficial) exist in various countries.

However, it's patently obvious from Lachman's account that not everything was well within The Work. Gurdjieff was an authoritarian, manipulative, erratic kook. The movement he created around himself had all the usual characters of a cult. Gurdjieff didn't even like Ouspensky! He seems to have recruited Ouspensky largely for strategic reasons. The unknown Armenian wanted influential, rich or prestigious supporters as a front. The erratic antics of Gurdjieff soon taxed Ouspensky's patience. The apostle broke with the master already before their respective departures from Russia. And yet, Ouspensky never *really* broke with Gurdjieff, maintaining a bizarre love-hate relationship with him for decades. This seems to have been the most disturbing aspect of their relationship: even though Ouspensky had left Gurdjieff behind, he nevertheless developed similar character traits and turned his own group into a kind of cult, with no little help from his wife Sophie Grigorievna, who had been a Gurdjieff devotee far longer than Ouspensky.

Lachman paints a tragic portrait of P.D. Ouspensky, as a man who started out as a positive, life-affirming, loving and independent-minded seeker, but ended up as a carbon-copy of Gurdjieff, the rogue guru he had repudiated. Ouspensky was a man who longed all his life for a transformative spiritual experience, but to no avail. He also longed for a teacher, and after the break with Gurdjieff, expected the *real* esoteric masters to contact him. Of course, they never did. The "Inner Circle" seems to have been a product of Ouspensky's own imagination.

But the most bizarre events took place shortly before Ouspensky's death. Much to the shock of his followers, Ouspensky declared that "the System" (his and Gurdjieff's spiritual path) was finished, that he had been wrong about it all along, and that everyone must strike out and experiment on their own. Only in such a manner can the truth eventually be found. Lachman believes that Ouspensky quite seriously wanted to break with his past, but his followers regarded Ouspensky's sudden turn of heart as a "test", and refused to go along with it! Ouspensky, already a sick and dying man, was trapped, surrounded by sheep-like devotees whose veneration seems to have increased the more their master condemned both them and his old message.

The worst loyalist was a young man named Rodney Collin, who for a time even adopted the speech patterns and personal mannerisms of Ouspensky, scaring the living daylights out of Ouspensky's wife Sophie (who by all accounts wasn't easily scared - she was, after all, one of the cult leaders!). Collin believed that Ouspensky was preparing himself to "die consciously" and would be transformed, Christ-like, to a luminous being with a mystical body existing for all eternity. In Britain, Collin took the dying Ouspensky on an extensive car ride across the country, during which the old man supposedly prepared himself to break free from the reincarnation cycle. Many people believed that the journey was Collin's idea, and that Ouspensky went along with it somewhat unwillingly. After the death and burial of Ouspensky, Collin entered his study, locked himself up and meditated for six days without eating, drinking or shaving. When the other devotees broke the door open, they found an emaciated Collin declaring that he had been in telepathic contact with Ouspensky, who had appointed Collin the new leader, that a New Age would soon dawn on man, etc.

In the event, nobody followed Collin. Most of Ouspensky's followers instead travelled to Paris and joined Gurdjieff's movement! They also published "In search of the miraculous", Ouspensky's book on The Fourth Way, a book Ouspensky expressly had forbidden them to ever publish. Thus, rather than breaking with The Work and leaving cultism behind, as Ouspensky had wanted them to do in his waning months, his brain-washed admirers decided to follow the very guru Ouspensky had tried decades to get away from. A partial exception was Ouspensky's close friend Maurice Nicoll. He never broke with the Fourth Way, but he *did* refuse to work with Gurdjieff. Yet, Nicolls' magnum opus is titled "Psychological commentaries on the teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky". Another exception was J. B. Bennett, who simply joined a new string of cults. Poor Collin moved to South America, still convinced that Ouspensky was evolving into a divine Sun-Being. He eventually died by falling from the tower of a cathedral...

There is enough material in this book for an entire congress of psychiatrists!

"In Search of P.D. Ouspensky" is a captivating read about the dysfunctional relationship between two spiritual masters. Unfortunately, the book is somewhat sloppy, not based on original research (Lachman can't read Russian) and has an obviously "journalistic" bent. I nevertheless award it four stars. If only half of what's in this book is true, I can only say: Karnak, come in, we have a problem!