Metaphors Book

Stunning, Wondrous and Life Transforming

There are no words to describe the real import and content of this book, nor to remotely intuit the many dimensions of reality that its ideas are extended too. Many hidden dimensions of life and connection with the world of true causes, of which we as mankind? are not even dimly aware. It seems mankind (aka consciousness) has settled instead for the world of the finite, the phenomenal and the positivistic and Ouspensky clearly shows in a very limpid and penetrating Tour-de-Force in words that this all ends in a horrible cul-de-sac. There is no 4th of July for science and instead with one fell swoop of his axe, he leaves the world of science, materialism and modern day psychology in ruins - they are seen as ancient Methuselahs, that have overstayed their welcome -perennial chickens that have lost their heads but still wander around tantalizing a few.

He starts out with his statement of what constitutes the world of the "knowns", namely - (I) The outer world of form, perception and conception and (ii) The inner world of consciousness and thought. He then shows and builds through the framework of an advanced multidimensional psychology that these two worlds are not separate from each other. In fact he shows in many elucidating examples that we only experience what we see as a 3-dimensional world because man possesses a 3-dimensional consciousness. That is man is able to think in concepts as well as percepts and sensations and concepts make it possible for him to experience a 3-d world. Lower animals and single celled organisms that are only capable of perception and sensation experience 2-dimensional and 1-dimensional worlds respectively and are therefore of a lower conscious evolution. They possess simple consciousness and do not possess self-consciousness and so are incapable of knowing themselves as a thing apart from their environment and from their perceptions and sensations. He shows how dogs see the world as a 2-dimensional screen of percepts and are incapable of generalizing their percepts under the banner of concepts and so deteriorate much faster mentally than man as they age. This 2-dimensional consciousness also explains why dogs bark at cars - they see them as `alive'.

Ouspensky brings us to the point where we can clearly see that man himself needs to be transformed. It is the consciousness that sees itself as man that is the chief obstacle standing in the way of progress. Until this is fully realized the myriad problems and sufferings appearing to be in the world outside will remain. They are the reflections of a deep fault and split in man, in which he has failed to take on his more divine and encompassing heritage and to grow. And so Ouspensky progresses inducting us into his new multidimensional psychology and he sees the next step-up for man is the development of 4-dimensional consciousness. This is the consciousness of the superman, spoken off by Jesus in the Bible, in which `time is no longer'. But because man, for the most part seems currently incapable of this conscious evolution, he continues to experience this 4th dimension as time and is restricted therefore to seeing the infinite 4th dimensional space as 3-dimensional world slices. This is depicted to him through his delusory sensory profiling network which pictures the inside to the outside in slices and world cuts on par with his learning and consciousness capabilities at that moment. Within the context of this limiting and false 3-dimensional world slices , Ouspensky points out that it is impossible to establish real cause-and-effect relationships. He gives many punishing examples, by making reference to lower dimensional spaces to show that we often establish cause-and-effect relationships to events that are absolutely disconnected from each other just because they seem to follow contiguously in a time progression within our frame of reference. In fact, Ouspensky shows as well that what we can consider effect is often cause and vica-versa and sometimes both are effects arising from a cause unseen and existing within ourselves, or outside 3-dimensional space. He shows by examples that what seems the same can be different and what seems different can be the same, albeit viewed from a different reference. And what seems separated by time and space in the 3-dimensional space need not be so in the greater context afforded in a higher dimensional space. In this higher dimensional space, closeness is based on affinity and essence rather than spatio-temporal closeness.

His higher logic and canon of thought is grounded in mystical understandings but seems perverse when viewed through the blind eyes of logic, rationalism and causal reasoning. This advanced logic follows through from the theory of infinite numbers, in which the part can be equal to the whole. And so the meaning of the part cannot be understood if we first separate it from the whole and then attempt to understand it. By attempting to separate it from the whole to understand it, we have invalidated the context by which it is meaningful and so lost access to meaning. There is no meaning of the part by itself. It is only its unity with the whole that gives it meaning.

Ouspensky clears states his advanced formulation of this understanding when he gives the equation [A = both A and Not A]. This means to truly understand the part, we have to include both the part and everything that seems outside it. In other words we can only understand the part by understanding the whole, or we can understand the whole by truly understanding the part , but we cannot separate the part from the whole and then try to understand. Any separation creates a false formulation of reality that invalidates the context that would make meaning possible. Ouspensky expands on this logic by extending it to words, concepts, symbols, phenomena and indeed to the world of positivism. He shows that because words, concepts, symbols and phenomena attempt first to partition and separate the reality of Oneness and real causes, they are incapable of apprehending it or serving as vehicles for teaching or expressing it. It is like we broke a mirror into a million pieces and then we use the pieces to attempt to teach you that the mirror is whole and complete. There are many more exceptional, and ground breaking teachings in this book. Ouspensky even dedicates a section to describing the features of the world of true causes.

In fact one of Ouspensky's purposes in this book is to bring one to an awareness that words, concepts, symbols and logic always miss reality and true content. Some of these characteristics that he gives for the world of real causes include that (I) It is a world in which time is experienced spatially (ii) A world in which everything is life itself and forever deathless. There is nothing apart from this one life, even the seemingly physical and inorganic (iii) A world without matter or motion (iv) A world without measure, finite quantities or form (v) A world of no separation in which everything is the whole (vi) A world transcending all seeming dualities, including being/non-being, death/life, motion/stillness, objective/subjective, phenomena/noumena. And yet the world of real causes is not separate from the world we appear to live in. It is the world we appear to live in experienced without duality. Experienced instead through the selflessness of the egoless state. This world of real causes echoes the Buddha's teachings that the Samsara and Nirvana or forever one. That the samsara - our world of the relative existence, namely Hell - is just Nirvana seen through the lens of ignorance and therefore darkness. The Samsara is restored to its ever-presence as Nirvana once the self-distortions that we interpose are removed.

Ouspensky spends the last part of this great work correlating the common threads and unity of many of his ideas, arrived through inductive reasoning and intuition with many of the teachings of the mystics including Jacob Boehme, "The voice of the silence", Theosophy, Feckner, and Dr Bucke's `Cosmic Consciousness'.