The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution E-Book

P.D. OUSPENSKY

• Herausgeber: E-BOOKARAMA
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Ouspensky’s five lectures which make up "The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution" were not originally intended to be published.

Reading them as a book gives practically no measure of the scale of time and study needed to realise, even partially, the ideas which are expressed or why Ouspensky expressed them in this short form.
The Russian philosopher considers the " forgotten science of psychology". Disregarding the study of man as he is or seems to be, with which the modern schools concern themselves, he turns to the study of man as he may be, what man's evolution means and the question of whether there are special conditions necessary to achieve it.

In the forty or fifty years since the lectures were composed, analytical, introspective psychology has captured the interest of the masses. It has become a major course of study in colleges and in the so-called ‘free university’ movement and a dominant factor in discussions of education, art, sports and even in commerce, natural science and religion, particularly among the young. Along with this, the conquest of outer space has given an impetus to psychological and metaphysical fantasies of every sort. But psychology as self-knowledge of what a man may become, and what place he has the right to assume in the whole scheme of the universe, has remained a forgotten, almost a disappearing, science.

Leseprobe

P. D. Ouspensky

The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution

Table of contents

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MAN’S POSSIBLE EVOLUTION

Introduction

First Lecture

Second Lecture

Third Lecture

Fourth Lecture

Fifth Lecture

Lecture Held Thursday, 23 September 1937

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MAN’S POSSIBLE EVOLUTION

P. D. Ouspensky

Introduction

Some years ago I began to receive letters from readers of my books. All these letters contained one question: what I had been doing after I had written my books, which were published in English in 1920 and 1931, and had been written in 1910 and 1912.

I could never answer these letters. It would have needed books even to attempt to do this. But when the people who wrote to me lived in London, where I lived after 1921, I invited them and arranged courses of lectures for them. In these lectures I tried to answer their questions and explain what I had discovered after I had written my two books, and what was the direction of my work.

In 1934 I wrote five preliminary lectures which gave a general idea of what I was studying, and also of the lines along which a certain number of people were working with me. To put all that in one, or even in two or three lectures, was quite impossible: so I al* ways warned people that it was not worth while hearing one lecture, or two, but that only five, or better ten lectures could give an idea of the direction of my work. These lectures have continued since then, and throughout this time I have often corrected and rewritten them.

On the whole I found the general arrangement satisfactory. Five lectures were read, in my presence or without me; listeners could ask questions; and if they tried to follow the advice and indications given them, which referred chiefly to self-observation and a certain self-discipline, they very soon had a quite sufficient working understanding of what I was doing.

I certainly recognized all the time that five lectures were not sufficient, and in talks that followed them I elaborated and enlarged the preliminary data, trying to show people their own position in relation to the New Knowledge.

I found that the chief difficulty for most people was to realize that they had really heard new things; that is, things that they had never heard before.

They did not formulate it for themselves, but in fact they always tried to contradict this in their minds and translate what they heard into their habitual language, whatever it happened to be. And this certainly I could not take into account.

I know that it is not an easy thing to realize that one is hearing new things. We are so accustomed to the old tunes, and the old motives, that long ago we ceased to hope and ceased to believe that there might be anything new.

And when we hear new things, we take them for old, or think that they can be explained and interpreted by the old. It is true that it is a difficult task to realize the possibility and necessity of quite new ideas, and it needs with time a revaluation of all usual values.

I cannot guarantee that you will hear new ideas, that is, ideas you never heard before, from the start; but if you are patient you will very soon begin to notice them. And then I wish you not to miss them, and to try not to interpret them in the old way.

New York, 1945

First Lecture

I shall speak about the study of psychology, but I must warn you that the psychology about which I speak is very different from anything you may know under this name.

To begin with I must say that practically never in history has psychology stood at so low a level as at the present time. It has lost all touch with its origin and its meaning so that now it is even difficult to define the term “psychology”: that is, to say what psychology is and what it studies. And this is so in spite of the fact that never in history have there been so many psychological theories and so many psychological writings.

Psychology is sometimes called a new science. This is quite wrong. Psychology is, perhaps, the oldest science, and, unfortunately, in its most essential features a forgotten science.

In order to understand how psychology can be defined it is necessary to realize that psychology except in modem times has never existed under its own name. By one reason or another psychology always was suspected of wrong or subversive tendencies, either religious or political or moral, and had to use different disguises.

For thousands of years psychology existed under the name of philosophy. In India all forms of Yoga, which are essentially psychology, are described as one of the six systems of philosophy. Sufi teachings, which again are chiefly psychological, are regarded as partly religious and partly metaphysical. In Europe, even quite recently, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, many works on psychology were referred to as philosophy. And in spite of the fact that almost all subdivisions of philosophy such as logic, the theory of cognition, ethics, aesthetics, referred to the work of the human mind or senses, psychology was regarded as inferior to philosophy and as relating only to the lower or more trivial sides of human nature.

Parallel with its existence under the name of philosophy, psychology existed even longer connected with one or another religion. This does not mean that religion and psychology ever were one and the same thing, or that the fact of the connection between religion and psychology was recognized. But there is no doubt that almost every known religion—certainly I do not mean modem sham religions—developed one or another kind of psychological teaching connected often with a certain practice, so that the study of religion very often included in itself the study of psychology.

There are many excellent works on psychology in quite orthodox religious literature of different countries and epochs. For instance, in early Christianity there was a collection of books of different authors under the general name of Philokalia, used in our time in the Eastern Church, especially for the instruction of monks.

During the time when psychology was connected with philosophy and religion it also existed in the form of art. Poetry, drama, sculpture, dancing, even architecture, were means for transmitting psychological knowledge. For instance, the Gothic cathedrals were in their chief meaning works on psychology.

In the ancient times before philosophy, religion, and art had taken their separate forms as we now know them, psychology had existed in the form of Mysteries, such as those of Egypt and of ancient Greece.

Later, after the disappearance of the Mysteries, psychology existed in the form of Symbolical Teachings which were sometimes connected with the religion of the period and sometimes not connected, such as astrology, alchemy, magic, and the more modem Masonry, occultism, and Theosophy.

And here it is necessary to note that all psychological systems and doctrines, those that exist or existed openly and those that were hidden or disguised, can be divided into two chief categories.

First: systems which study man as they find him, or such as they suppose or imagine him to be. Modem “scientific” psychology, or what is known under that name, belongs to this category.

Second: systems which study man not from the point of view of what he is, or what he seems to be, but from the point of view of what he may become; that is, from the point of view of his possible evolution.

These last systems are in reality the original ones, or in any case the oldest, and only they can explain the forgotten origin and the meaning of psychology.

When we understand the importance of the study of man from the point of view of his possible evolution, we shall understand that the first answer to the question, what is psychology, should be that psychology is the study of the principles, laws, and facts of man's possible evolution.

Here, in these lectures, I shall speak only from this point of view.

Our first question will be, what does evolution of man mean, and the second, are there any special conditions necessary for it.

As regards ordinary modem views on the origin of man and his previous evolution I must say at once that they cannot be accepted. We must realize that we know nothing about the origin of man and we have no proofs of man’s physical or mental evolution.

On the contrary, if we take historical mankind, that is, humanity for ten or fifteen thousand years, we may find unmistakable signs of a higher type of man, whose presence can be established on the evidence of ancient monuments and memorials which cannot be repeated or imitated by the present humanity.

As regards prehistoric man or creatures similar in appearance to man and yet at the same time very different from him, whose bones are sometimes found in deposits of glacial or pre-glacial periods, we may accept the quite possible view that these bones belong to some being quite different from man, which died out long ago.

Denying previous evolution of man, we must deny any possibility of future mechanical evolution of man; that is, evolution happening by itself according to laws of heredity and selection, and without man’s conscious efforts and understanding of his possible evolution.

Our fundamental idea shall be that man as we know him is not a completed being; that nature develops him only up to a certain point and then leaves him, to develop further, by his own efforts and devices, or to live and die such as he was born, or to degenerate and lose capacity for development.