In Search of the Miraculous
Written: Jan 04 '02 (Updated Oct 08 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Challenging
Cons: Challenging
The Bottom Line: A must for any serious student of man and his place in the cosmos.
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| ronaldito's Full Review: P.D. Ouspensky - In Search of the Miraculous: Frag... |
Ouspensky invested at least ten years writing, editing and refining In Search of the Miraculous; those ten years were based on many previous years of his intimate contact with G. I. Gurdjieff and his teaching under severe and sometimes life-threatening conditions caused by the political upheaval in revolutionary Russia and two world wars. The manuscript was compiled after Ouspensky had stepped aside from Gurdjieff to pursue his own work but it was acknowledged by Gurdjieff to be an accurate and fair account of his work prior to its publication.
The title of the book is in itself quite telling: that it is based on a quest, a seeking, and not necessarily on a finding of a truth and nailing it to a door. While it is clear that Ouspensky did, in fact, discover many great truths and find much which was miraculous in its nature, the material is not presented dogmatically or with presumption. The sub-title, "fragments of an unknown teaching," is equally revealing, alerting the reader that the book is not an A to Z manual of spiritual enlightenment.
Reviewing a text such as this is dicey at best because of the complexity of the material and the enormity of the questions that it engages --as well as the questions it evokes in the reviewer. Likewise, any commentator would have to be humbled by the power of Ouspensky's intellect as well as by ideas such as "the laws of creation and maintenance of the universe." Indeed.
However, Ouspensky presents these fragments of an unknown teaching with a deft, clear hand that illuminates their veracity without in any way simplifying or diluting their potency, as seems to be the case in the current trend of spiritual-philosophism. The astute reader will detect that while this is a serious text, it is not pipe-smokingly ponderous and that it is written in simple declarative sentences without imposing literary decorations.
At the core of these fragments is man and his place in the universe. Ouspensky, being both journalist and mathematician, was a well suited pupil for Gurdjieff's ideas, and in his narrative he weaves for us this mandella, if you will, of epic proportion. The reading of the book can be an annoying experience: "man is a machine," "man is asleep," "organic life on earth is eaten by the moon," and the tedious diagrams and numbers that seemingly quantify, diminish and pigeonhole the grandeur that is man can be very vexatious. At the other end of the stick, however, is this marvelous realization that man is a machine that can know his mechanism -- his mechanicality-- if he studies it, and that a sleeping man has the possibility to be awakened.
In Search of the Miraculous is not for the spiritually lazy; it requires a great deal of the reader, really. But through the narrative, the diagrams and the mathematics, sometimes, something so real begins to be felt that parts of the body start to tingle. Among the many fine texts available from the spiritual and philosophical traditions, as well as a smattering of new publications, In Search of the Miraculous stands out as a sort of touch-stone by which one can prove one's gold.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
ronaldito
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Reviews written: 9
Trusted by: 1 member
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