Fragments, Chapter 16, pp.322-328 - Reading Club posting 58
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This is this is the 58th of our weekly readings in Fragments Reading Club from P.D. Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous, where we are gradually working our way through the whole book.
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"Diagram of Everything Living." G. leaves Petersburg for the last time. An interesting event— "transfiguration" or "plastics"? A Journalist's impressions of G. The downfall of Nicholas II. "The end of Russian history."
In one of the following conversations G. again returned to the subject of classification according to cosmic traits.
"There is still another system of classification,"' he said, "which you also ought to understand. This is a classification in an altogether different ratio of octaves. The first classification by 'food,' 'air,' and medium definitely refers to 'living beings' as we know them, including plants, that is to say, to individuals. The other classification of which I shall now speak leads us far beyond the limits of what we call 'living beings' both upwards, higher than living beings, as well as downwards, lower than living beings, and it deals not with individuals but with classes in a very wide sense. Above all this classification shows that there are no jumps whatever in nature. In nature everything is connected and everything is alive. The diagram of this classification is called the 'Diagram of Everything Living.'
"According to this diagram every kind of creature, every degree of being, is defined by what serves as food for this kind of creature or being of a given level and for what they themselves serve as food, because in the cosmic order each class of creature feeds on a definite class of lower creature and is food for a definite class of higher creatures."
G. drew a diagram in the form of a ladder with eleven squares. And in each square excepting the two higher he put three circles with numbers. (See Fig. 58.)
"Each square denotes a level of being," he said. "The 'hydrogen' in the lower circle shows what the given class of creatures feeds on. The 'hydrogen' in the upper circle shows the class which feeds on these features. And the 'hydrogen' in the middle circle is the average 'hydrogen' of this class showing what these creatures are.
"The place of man is the seventh square from the bottom or the fifth square from the top. According to this diagram man is 'hydrogen' 24, he feeds on 'hydrogen' 96, and is himself food for 'hydrogen' 6. The square next below man will be 'vertebrates'; the next 'invertebrates.' Invertebrates are 'hydrogen' 96. Consequently man feeds on 'invertebrates.'
"Do not for the moment look for contradictions but try to understand what this may mean. And equally do not compare this diagram with others. According to the diagram of food man feeds on 'hydrogen' 768; according to this diagram on 'hydrogen' 96. Why? What does it mean? Both the one is right and the other is right. Later, when you grasp this you will piece everything together into one.
'The square next below is—plants. The next—minerals, the next—metals, which constitute a separate cosmic group among minerals; and the following square has no name in our language because we never meet
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with matter in this state on the earth's surface. This square comes into contact with the Absolute. You remember we spoke before about 'Holy the Firm.' This is 'Holy the Firm.'"
At the bottom of the last square he placed a small triangle with its apex below.
"Now, on the other side of man is square 3, 12, 48. This is a class of creatures which we do not know. Let us call them 'angels.' The next square—1, 6, 24; let us call these beings 'archangels.'"
In the following square he put figures 3 and 12 and two circles, each with a point at their centers, and called it the "Eternal Unchanging," and in the next square he put the figures 1 and 6; he put a circle in the middle and in this circle a triangle containing another circle with a point at its center and called it the "Absolute."
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"This diagram will not be very comprehensible to you at first," he said. "But gradually you will learn to make it out. Only for a long time you will have to take it separately from all the rest."
This was in fact all I heard from G. about this strange diagram which actually appeared to upset a great deal of what had been said before.
In our conversations about this diagram we very soon agreed to take "angels" as planets and "archangels" as suns. Many other things gradually became clear to us. But what used to confuse us a great deal was the appearance of "hydrogen" 6144 which was absent altogether in the previous scale of "hydrogens" in the third scale which ended with "hydrogen" 3072. At the same time, G. insisted that the enumeration of "hydrogens" had been taken according to the third scale.
A long time afterwards I asked him what this meant.
"It is an incomplete 'hydrogen,'" he said. "A 'hydrogen' without the Holy Ghost. It belongs to the same, that is to the third, scale, but it is unfinished.
"Each complete 'hydrogen' is composed of 'carbon,' 'oxygen,' and 'nitrogen.' Now take the last 'hydrogen' of the third scale, 'hydrogen' 3072. This 'hydrogen' is composed of 'carbon' 512, 'oxygen' 1536, and 'nitrogen' 1024.
"Now further: 'Nitrogen' becomes 'carbon' for the next triad, but there is no 'oxygen' for it and no 'nitrogen.' Therefore by condensation it becomes itself 'hydrogen' 6144, but it is a dead hydrogen without any possibility of passing into anything further, a 'hydrogen' without the Holy Ghost."
This was G.'s last visit to Petersburg. I tried to speak to him about impending events. But he said nothing definite on which I could base my own actions.
A very interesting event took place in connection with his departure. This happened at the railway station. We were all seeing him off at the Nikolaievsky Station. G. was standing talking to us on the platform by the carriage. He was the usual G. we had always known. After the second bell he went into the carriage—his compartment was next to the door—and came to the window.
He was different! In the window we saw another man, not the one who had gone into the train. He had changed during those few seconds. It is very difficult to describe what the difference was, but on the platform he had been an ordinary man like anyone else, and from the carriage a man of quite a different order was looking at us, with a quite exceptional importance and dignity in every look and movement, as though he had sud-
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denly become a ruling prince or a statesman of some unknown kingdom to which he was traveling and to which we were seeing him off.
Some of our party could not at the time clearly realize what was happening but they felt and experienced in an emotional way something that was outside the ordinary run of phenomena. All this lasted only a few seconds. The third bell followed the second bell almost immediately, and the train moved out.
I do not remember who was the first to speak of this "transfiguration" of G. when we were left alone, and then it appeared that we had all seen it, though we had not all equally realized what it was while it was taking place. But all, without exception, had felt something out of the ordinary.
G. had explained to us earlier that if one mastered the art of plastics one could completely alter one's appearance. He had said that one could become beautiful or hideous, one could compel people to notice one or one could become actually invisible.
What was this? Perhaps it was a case of "plastics."
But the story is not yet over. In the carriage with G. there traveled A. (a well-known journalist) who was at that time being sent away from Petersburg (this was just before the revolution). We who were seeing G. off, were standing at one end of the carriage while at the other end stood a group seeing A. off.
I did not know A. personally, but among the people seeing him off were several acquaintances of mine and even a few friends; two or three of them had been at our meetings and these were going from one group to the other.
A few days later the paper to which A. was contributing contained an article "On the Road" in which A. described the thoughts and impressions he had on the way from Petersburg to Moscow. A strange Oriental had traveled in the same carriage with him, who, among the bustling crowd of speculators who filled the carriage, had struck him by his extraordinary dignity and calm, exactly as though these people were for him like small flies upon whom he was looking from inaccessible heights. A. judged him to be an "oil king" from Baku, and in conversation with him several enigmatic phrases that he received still further strengthened him in his conviction that here was a man whose millions grew while he slept and who looked down from on high at bustling people who were striving to earn a living and to make money.
My fellow traveler kept to himself also; he was a Persian or Tartar, a silent man in a valuable astrakhan cap; he had a French novel under his arm. He was drinking tea, carefully placing the glass to cool on the small window-sill table; he occasionally looked with the utmost contempt at the bustle and noise of those extraordinary, gesticulating people. And they on their part glanced at him, so it seemed to me, with great attention, if not with respectful awe. What
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interested me most was that he seemed to be of the same southern Oriental type as the rest of the group of speculators, a flock of vultures flying somewhere into Agrionian space in order to tear some carrion or other—he was swarthy, with jet-black eyes, and a mustache like Zelim-Khan . . . . Why does he so avoid and despise his own flesh and blood? But to my good fortune he began to speak to me.
"They worry themselves a great deal," he said, his face motionless and sallow, in which the black eyes, polite as in the Oriental, were faintly smiling.
He was silent and then continued:
"Yes, in Russia at present there is a great deal of business out of which a clever man could make a lot of money." And after another silence he explained:
"After all it is the war. Everyone wants to be a millionaire."
In his tone, which was cold and calm, I seemed to detect a kind of fatalistic and ruthless boasting which verged on cynicism, and I asked him somewhat bluntly:
"And you?"
"What?" he asked me back.
"Do not you also want this?"
He answered with an indefinite and slightly ironical gesture.
It seemed to me that he had not heard or had not understood and I repeated:
"Don't you make profits too?"
He smiled particularly quietly and said with gravity:
"We always make a profit. It does not refer to us. War or no war it is all the same to us. We always make a profit."
[G. of course meant esoteric work, "the collecting of knowledge" and the collecting of people. But A. understood that he was speaking about "oil."]
It would be curious to talk and become more closely acquainted with the psychology of a man whose capital depends entirely upon order in the solar system, which is hardly likely to be upset and whose interests for that reason prove to be higher than war and peace . . . .
In this way A. concluded the episode of the "oil king."
We were particularly surprised by G.'s "French novel." Either A. invented it, adding it to his own impressions, or G. actually made him "see," that is, presume, a French novel in some small volume in a yellow, or perhaps not even a yellow cover, because G. of course did not read French.
After G.'s departure up to the time of the revolution we only got news of him from Moscow once or twice.
All my plans had long since been upset. I had not succeeded in publishing the books I intended to publish; I had not succeeded in preparing anything for foreign editions, although right from the beginning of the
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war I saw that my literary work would have to be transferred abroad. During the past two years I had given up all my time to G.'s work, to his groups, to talks connected with this work, to journeys from Petersburg, and had completely neglected my own affairs.
Meanwhile the atmosphere was growing gloomier. One felt that something was bound to happen and that very soon. Only those upon whom the course of events still appeared to depend were unable to see and feel this. The marionettes failed to understand the danger that threatened them and did not understand that the very same wire which pulls the villain with a knife in his hand from behind a bush makes them turn and look at the moon. A marionette theater is worked in the same way.
Finally the storm broke. The "great bloodless revolution" took place—the most absurd and the most blatant lie that could have been thought of. But the most extraordinary thing of all was that people who were there on the spot, in the center of everything that was happening, could believe in this lie, and in the midst of all the murders could speak about a "bloodless" revolution.
I remember that we spoke at the time of the "power of theories." People who had been waiting for the revolution, who had put all their hopes in it, and who had seen in it liberation from something, could not and did not want to see what was actually happening and only saw what in their opinion ought to be happening.
When I read in a leaflet printed on one side only the news of the abdication of Nicholas II, I felt that in this lay the center of gravity of everything that took place.
"Ilovaisky may rise from the grave and write at the end of his books: 'March, 1917, the end of Russian history,'" I said to myself.
I had no feelings whatever for the dynasty, but I simply did not wish to deceive myself as many others were doing at that time.
I had always been interested in the person of the Emperor Nicholas II; he seemed to me to be a remarkable man in many ways; but he was completely misunderstood and did not understand his own self. That I was right is proved by the end of his diary which was published by the bolsheviks and which referred to the time when, betrayed and left by all, he showed wonderful strength and even greatness of mind.
But after all, the matter had nothing to do with him as a person but with the principle of the unity of power and the responsibility to this power which he represented in himself. It is true that this principle was denied by a considerable part of the Russian intelligentsia. And for the people the word "czar" had long lost all significance. But this word still had a very great significance for the army and for the bureaucratic machine which, though very imperfect, nevertheless worked and held every-
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thing together. The "czar" was the indispensable central part of this machine. The abdication of the "czar" at such a moment was bound to destroy the whole machine. And we had nothing else. The celebrated "public-co-operation," for the creation of which so many sacrifices had been made, proved, as was to be expected, to be bluff. To create anything "on the move" was impossible. Events were moving at a breathless speed. The army broke up in a few days. The war in reality had stopped earlier. But the new government did not wish to recognize this fact. A fresh lie was started. But what was most surprising in all this was that people should find something to be glad about. I do not speak of the soldiers who broke out of barracks or out of the trains which were ready to carry them to the slaughter. But I was surprised at our "intelligentsia" who from "patriots" immediately became "revolutionaries" and "socialists." Even the Novoe Vremya suddenly became a socialist paper. The famous Menshikov wrote one article "about freedom," but he evidently could not swallow it himself and gave it up.