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Conversations with Madame Ouspensky
Compiled and edited by
Dorothy Darlington
Gurdjieff Heritage Society
COPYRIGHT 2021 by D. Darlington and C. Smith
COPYRIGHT 2021 by D. Darlington and C. Smith
The authors assert their moral rights in the work. Originally published as an ebook by Buzzword Books, Australia, 2018 ISBN: 978-1-7368823-0-6
Design by David Clark Perry. All rights reserved.
Gurdjieff Heritage Society, Inc.
TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE EDITOR’S NOTE TALKS AT MENDHAM 1945 It is time to start work. 1 These evenings can only be useful if you remember their purpose. 2 We have asked what leads to consciousness. 3 Three of Gurdjieff’s aphorisms 4 The question is what to fight? 5 What is work in our ordinary lives? 6 Mistakes happen because we are not clear what work is 7 We are sleepwalkers 8 Try to remember why Saturday evenings started 9 1946 Try to reconstruct 11 For man, there exists only what he perceives 12 Man is a machine 13 What is this house for? 15 Everything is under law. 16 Someone asked about imagination. 17 Question: I think if one really sees 19 Everybody speaks about their own opinions. 21 Question: I don’t see how to go against 22 Individual man 23 You cannot speak of digging 24 The three storied factory 25 1947 We are not what we should be. 27 We need to sum up for ourselves 28 Here, in order to work 31 Again conversation goes round 34 Everything is relative 35
JOTTINGS FROM A NOTEBOOK 36 EXTRACT FROM A LETTER TO MR OUSPENSKY IN 1919 41 DICTATED MESSAGES — 1948 43 NOVEMBER 1951 45 MESSAGE TO HOUSE ON OCTOBER 30th, 1949 47 APPENDIX MADAME OUSPENSKY: A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY 49 DOROTHY DARLING: AN APPRECIATION 55 SOURCES AND EDITING 59
PREFACE
Madame Ouspensky’s place in Gurdjieff ’s System is relatively unknown. Her role was never publicized. People on the periphery were not even aware that her House in the country existed.
Madame and P. D. Ouspensky had both very specific functions in the work. His was to disseminate the Ideas in pure form. Hers was to work with people individually who, as she said, ‘already knew what they wanted.’
When she left the Prieuré in 1929, Gurdjieff gave her a MS copy of Beelzebub’s Tales with the words, ‘Go and help your husband in London.’
For this purpose she organized a House for Work based on the principles laid down at the Prieuré. Here some people could live, others visit.
To show people what they actually were and to fight on the side of the ‘eternal against the temporal’ was a task that aroused little gratitude in unprepared people or in those who defended and protected their little selves whose very life was threatened. But to those who really wished to see themselves—to see what IS—she gave inestimable help.
I was present at her reunion with Gurdjieff at Mendham in 1948. It was as though they had never been apart. And because I was with her, he gave me some experiences that after the passage of thirty years are still vividly present.
During this, his last visit to U.S., Gurdjieff told Madame Ouspensky: ‘I need you to help me in my work for the next ten years.’ He himself died the following year but she carried out his wish to her own final illness—just over ten years later.
Dorothy Darlington
EDITOR’S NOTE
In Madame Ouspensky’s successive houses near London and later at Mendham, New Jersey, Saturday evenings were reserved for a particular purpose.
It was then that she would speak of the Ideas.
But she did not give lectures. This book records some of her talks—many verbatim and others, particularly those of 1945, pieced together from notes that she corrected. Nothing has been added and, where possible, her own Anglo-Russian idiom has been preserved.
Where repetition occurs it is and was deliberate. Madame herself called it, ‘beating on the same point.’ It must also be remembered that the talks were addressed to different people on different occasions and at different times.
1945
It is time to start work. Enough talking. What is work? How to work? How to start? Work is a definite effort directed to a definite aim. But which aim? For us, development of consciousness— change from one level to another which is higher. A man is only with us if he has this aim. For work, organization is needed because man cannot work alone. What does an organization mean? It means putting definite limitations on people. Each person in it has a place and a definite function to fulfil. ‘Place’ is determined by specific gravity. No one can give a man his place or take it away. It depends on valuation of the work— the extent of valuation. Is a man’s valuation really for the work or is it personal, for himself?
1
These evenings can only be useful if you remember their purpose. The purpose is self-examination. You are not here for a lecture or idle talk. It is no good coming as an audience. Self-examination means finding our position relative to this work...what we know and what we don’t know, what we have concluded, what we have really taken from the System—have accepted or not. Whether we want to begin. Whether we have aim and want to change. Or whether, perhaps, we are here by mistake—have come into the wrong shop. How much, after so many years, have we really accepted? It seems we avoid thinking so as not to see where we stand. It is necessary to start. And our common aim should be consciousness. What leads to it? What prevents it? Self-examination can show us. Sleep prevents it—turning thoughts, imagination, ego and so on. It is only possible to gain consciousness as much as we go against these. One is at the expense of the other. We need to learn which of our features are harmful to our work and which lead toward our aim. If we inner consider, are envious or critical, it is obvious where these lead. So our reactions and actions place us. They show our position relative to work. Don’t judge others. Examine yourself. For this, deep self-sincerity is needed. 2 Excerpt for marketing purposes only. Do not copy, publish or otherwise re-distribute without permission.
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