Less and Less Sane

Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum, first published in Russian in 1912, is a reasonably systematic exposition of a mysticism that was essentially compounded of the Hindu Vedanta and non-Euclidian mathematics. His later works were less coherent, and this posthumous volume is necessarily diffuse and repetitious; for it is a transcription of questions posed by his pupils and of answers given in English, a language of which Ouspensky was not entirely a master.

The essentials of his doctrine have undergone little significant change. There is in man an essence which survives death and is subject to a law of “recurrence” that is fundamentally the Buddhistic conception of palingenesis of the will, modified on the one hand by Nietzsche’s Ewige Wiederkehr and on the other, strangely enough, by the association of birth with place assumed in the early Norse belief in reincarnation.

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Revilo Oliver

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Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum, first published in Russian in 1912, is a reasonably systematic exposition of a mysticism that was essentially compounded of the Hindu Vedanta and non-Euclidian mathematics. His later works were less coherent, and this posthumous volume is necessarily diffuse and repetitious; for it is a transcription of questions posed by his pupils and of answers given in English, a language of which Ouspensky was not entirely a master.

The essentials of his doctrine have undergone little significant change. There is in man an essence which survives death and is subject to a law of “recurrence” that is fundamentally the Buddhistic conception of palingenesis of the will, modified on the one hand by Nietzsche’s Ewige Wiederkehr and on the other, strangely enough, by the association of birth with place assumed in the early Norse belief in reincarnation.