Customer Reviews

A New Model of the Universe (Dover Occult)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

A hugely encompassing book on mysticism and the nature of consciousness/reality.The collection of thoughts Ouspesky enclosed therein,are mostly relevant to todays spiritual/metaphysical ponderings.And i would go as far as to say invaluable to anyone with an interest in such things. Although,most of the precepts expounded by him,were more or less 'aquired' from a number of fairly obvious (and he does mention some of them) sources,he has an acute knack of being able to explain (most of the time!),exactly what it is he wants you to understand. i think the most important chapters in this book,deal with spatial/time recognition and interpretation;Namely 'the 4th dimension'(can i point the reader in the direction of 'Flatland',by Edwin A Abbot?An obvious source for his explanation of point and line to plane). He was most certainly a man of grandoise vision.And that can be summarised simply from one chapter;where he tries to explain the fractal nature of the universe.Of course,80 odd years before scientists had formulated the theory of chaos and the fractal complexity of nature,he didnt have any real reference points or terms with which to impart his idea to the reader. But still he manages to outline,and infuse his thoughts with clarity and vibrancy. He presents the esoteric in a very un-esoteric way. I read this book about 30 times when i was a teenager.Even after immersing myself through the Jung and Neitzche etc. I still returned to this book for inspiration. And i'd recommend Ouspensky as the definitive,and most accessable author on this subject (excepting maybe Crowley,who is on the whole,inaccessable,problematic,and riddled with frustratingly curious,but almost inpenetrable dead-ends!). So go Ouspesky :O)

I really liked this book. It was challenging and revealing with regards to aspects of human thought. What particularly struck me with this book, is the complete honesty that the author adopts when pursuing an area of interest to him. What this means is that there aren't many assumptions, and the author has no following judgment from assumption meaning he is open to all possibilities in circumstance. Because assumption isn't presented, it tends to rub off on you, and you learn with the refreshing vigour of a childs mind. The authors inquisitive nature coupled with this rare gift of being humbled in the face of mystery, and also looking at the way we think and perceive, has made him a receptacle for boundless knowledge. What will be taken from any situation will be maximal from these qualities alone, and his knowledge gained is presented here. Sometimes you hear of the "Human Factor" as a problem in certain environments, well there is no "human factor" here, just a presentation of pursued lines of thought as honestly recorded as can be. This is an excellent book, ...despite my ramblings!

In this engrossing book P.D.Ouspensky sheds light on the original purpose of real art, real science - indeed any real current of thought. It is to this purpose we have shut our eyes in our fascination with the surrounding world. Our innate purpose is to "be", in a very different sense than is generally inferred. The attempts of art and of religion to reach man in some new way were attempts to show man this new possibility, to elevate his perspective to see what he may become.

But nowadays it cannot be assumed that many forms of art, religion or science are in a state to assist us, because these original attempts to "help" will in time degenerate and no longer act on us with much effect. This is a book from which one can become a bit more discriminating about the valuable aspects of religion and art, and hopefully find a way to truth in some intact form. This outside help is needed, but we should not have to take anyone's word for anything if we wish to prove it for ourselves.

Ouspensky is the most lucid writer on mysticism, sacred geometry, time and the fourth dimension I have ever read, and I've read 'em all. He is the author of three all-time classics: In Search of the Miraculous, Tertium Organum, and this one, which is a large collection of essays on a variety of subjects, and not just the best of his books, but probably the single most important work of esotericism of the 20th century. That's not hyperbole. There's a reason why it stays in print. Ouspensky was smarter than Einstein (and understood time better) and wiser than the Buddha. And more enlightened than Gurdjieff, no matter what anybody says. On the price of your soul, get this book.

This book deals with many of to-day's taboos, as they are the very motors at the back of the deviations and the disparation of the present society. In the quest for the true course of the creation, Ouspensky here keeps to a very stern rudder based on ancient knowledge and uncompromizing vision.

Ouspensky writes most elloquently of a fundamental principle of thought. He points out the universality of all of mans work to understand the incomprehensible and in a most objective manner. This demonstrates the other important point he makes; that there is no place in a honest mind for the preconceptions and misinformation our generic society has imposed upon us. All in all, a great read, it you are willing to put forth the effort to think about it. If not, pass it by.

I have not yet read this book, as it just arrived a few moments ago, but I ordered it on the basis of a past reading of Ouspensky's, In Search Of The Miraculous. Imagine my surprise and disappointment, if you will, to discover that this is not the whole book, but a reprint of an extract of Chapter 10, commencing at page 390 of the original text.

No doubt, I will probably enjoy this $14.00, one chapter snippet of Ouspensky's work, but there really should be a disclaimer added to the Amazon text to be viewed by prospective purchasers. You ARE NOT getting the entire book, just chapter 10.

I rated this book 2 stars on the basis of deceptive advertising and not as a critique of Ouspensky's thinking.

It is a book I owed for many years and I have been reeding it many times. Written at the beguinning of the past century it is still very actual. I love the chapter on dreams and the story of the Buddha with the saffire eyes.

One of the advantages of broadband Internet access is the opportunity to purchase books and to read reviews by other people who have read them. I have recently done this with Ouspensky's `A New Model of the Universe', a book I originally read over 30 years ago, and which I lent to someone but never had returned.

It's 554 pages long. There are 12 chapters, one of which bears the title of the book - New Model of the Universe I and II.

Would it surprise you to know that not one of the reviewers actually read the book? Oh to be sure, their eyes all looked at the pages and they saw all the words.

But did any of them actually absorb what Ouspensky has written, and did the wisdom, genius and knowledge contained in his writing actually sink into any of their brains?

Sadly not! Or if it did, they are keeping it very much to themselves.

The first paragraph of page 1 of the Introduction begins:

There exist moments in life, separated by long intervals of time, but linked together by their inner content and by a certain singular sensation peculiar to them. Several such moments always recur to my mind together, and I feel then that it is these that have determined the chief trend of my life.

Some 20 years later, I wrote an essay `Moments of Truth' which begins:

Moments of truth, or periodic lapses into bouts of ever-greater self delusion? Such is the complexity and mystery surrounding the phenomenon of life, existence and death, that often we are confronted with extreme paradox and dichotomy, especially when our most dearly held convictions and beliefs can seem empty and without substance in the face of hard, stark reality.

We can remind ourselves of these moments. We can remember what we were doing, how we were feeling, and the circumstances. We can remember whom we were with, perhaps we were alone. We can remember the events leading up to the moment, and how these moments of truth were revealed to us.

Did we see something unique and out of this world? Did we absorb an experience that forever changed our view of the world? Were we persuaded by the thoughts and words of others - ideas that acted as a catalyst, and which crystallised what we may already have believed, but never realised - until now?

Perhaps I'd forgotten what Ouspensky wrote; however, the significance of what he said clearly was not lost on me. I just needed to rephrase the idea.

The central theme of the book is an exploration of possible answers to three questions:

1. What form has the world (universe)?
2. Is the world a chaos or a system?
3. Did the world come into being accidentally, or was it created according to plan?

And strange though it may appear at the first glance, one or another solution of the first question actually determines the possible solutions of both the second and third questions. (Ouspensky's words).

Until yesterday, I did not remember that there was a 3rd question. At least I did, but I did not acknowledge its significance.

As a non-believer (in God) the very idea that the Universe could have come into being according to a plan is preposterous, and does not even bear consideration.

On page 4 of his introduction, Ouspensky puts the question - does death exist?

Logically speaking, of course death exists. It exists all around us. My grandparents were once alive, now they are dead. Simple as that.

But what about my death? At some time in the future (whatever that means) I will presumably die. But then I ask myself, what does it mean to be alive?

The state of being alive is something that suddenly hits us sometime during our childhood. We suddenly become aware of being alive after having in fact been alive for many years.

Our consciousness gradually introduces us to the awareness that we are actually alive. Why?

Why do we become aware that we are alive, and why does it happen when it does? Why not a year before, or a year later?

At some later stage in our life, we become aware that we are not immortal, and is the point at which, for the first time in our lives perhaps, death assumes some kind of future reality, even if it is only tenuous and still far away.

There is death from natural causes - old age, and there is premature death - death that occurs earlier than it might otherwise occur were it not for accidents or irresponsible acts of overeating and/or conspicuous consumption of alcohol and cigarettes perhaps.

The death of a child is considered to be a far more tragic loss than the death of a grandparent. We might say - `what a terrible loss, s/he had her whole life before her', for is it not so, that at the back of our minds, we can't help thinking that there are objectives to being alive.

Objectives can exist on different levels. On the one hand, survival of the species dictates that some of us at least will bear progeny, so one objective would be to get married and have children.

However, when those children are grown up and we are in our 60s, life then appears to provide us with other objectives, objectives that are not so clearly defined, but they would appear to be objectives nonetheless, goals to reach, though what they might be are as yet undetermined.

One of the characteristics of being human is that we accumulate a vast storehouse of knowledge, insight and wisdom in our brains.

Why?

When our responsibilities as parents are done with, we continue to read, to write, to absorb information, to continue to learn about the world we live in, to look for specific information to help us better understand, perhaps to discover some secrets about life that we weren't aware of.

Why do we do this?

There are two ways of looking at this - in my view.

(i) we are dissatisfied with our present way of life and wish to change it in some way. However, this is unsatisfactory for in our hearts we know that nothing we do or say can change anything, except perhaps our own perceptions and opinions.

(ii) Perhaps we need to look at life, death and existence from a new perspective

Since we don't know what death is, or indeed if it does exist as a total finality, can we ask the question, does everything about us die? For example, does all the knowledge that we have accumulated during our life also die?

Two things we do know about information from our knowledge of computers. Sophisticated compression techniques means that enormous quantities of information can be packed into databases. Secondly, retrieval of that information is often performed using indirect addressing, i.e. we get the information indirectly via a known location. Suppose the information in our brains is actually located somewhere else outside of us. After all, the source of a radio program is definitely not in the radio, but the radio might be mistaken for thinking that it is (were radios to have a brain)

The last 2 chapters in Ouspensky's book are `Eternal Recurrence' - 48 pages, and `Sex and Evolution' - in 36 pages.

He describes his `new model of the universe' in 73 pages. Thompson's discovery of the electron in 1894 marked the boundary between the old Euclidean and Newtonian physics, and the new physics of quantum mechanics and special relativity which pretty much destroyed the old physics.

Ouspensky sets about destroying the new physics, or as he puts it:

I will now try to make a brief survey of the fundamental ideas of old physics which led to the necessity for building `new physics', which has unexpectedly destroyed old physics; and then I will come to the ideas of new physics which lead us to the possibility of building a `new model of the universe', which destroys new physics just as new physics destroyed old physics.

At some point between 1980 and 2000, I hit upon the concept of `personal evolution'

To hell with evolution of the species or what might happen to the human race in 100 years time. The mystery of the depth of human emotion prompted me to ask the question - if we are capable of experiencing feelings that are so incredibly beautiful, yet we only get permitted to experience them the once, why?

The feelings that we undoubtedly must have experienced when we were held in our mother's arms just after we are born, must surely be one of the most profoundly beautiful experiences that humans are capable of feeling.

Some of us are perhaps lucky to experience similar feelings in adult life, though we might be hard pressed to connect them with the same feelings we experienced at birth.

Logically speaking, this is the one and only life we live, and all that we experience is down purely to luck, upbringing, and who we may or may not happen to come into contact with during our lives.

However, Ouspensky draws on what he calls the psychological method as opposed to the logical method, so when it comes to a subject as profound as the meaning of death, looking for the answers from the logical perspective does not help us to understand or to realise what else might or might not be going on.

In my writings, I have deduced that consciousness is not an innate property of human brain cells, but is an external phenomenon that humans are capable of connecting with, much like a radio is able to connect with radio waves that form part of the electromagnetic spectrum and extract the signal contained in those waves.

In this life, we become aware of the profound depths that human emotion is capable of experiencing. Those experiences may be fleeting and only last for a short time, but they are real nonetheless.

Suppose we would like to relive those experiences. In what circumstances could we relive those experiences, and how might we go about preparing the way such that we can make it a reality?

Hence, the idea of personal evolution. We hypothesise that, based on all that we have read and learnt and written about, life is a recurring cycle that has as its boundaries our moments of birth and death which are one and the same thing if you understand the true meaning of time. This is where Ouspensky enlightens us in a way that no other philosopher has succeeded in doing.

In this life, we get to understand what our objective is, which is to lengthen and to extend the moments of supreme bliss and paradise until ultimately, our lives are nothing but.

And the way it will work is this - with each life, the moment when we first become aware that we are alive will creep ever closer towards that moment at birth when we first begin suckling at our mother's breast. The state of awareness means that rather than being driven by unconscious feelings and desires, we can instead use our conscious intelligence to achieve those goals early on in life and thus avoid making so many of the mistakes that we unwittingly end up making (My words, not Ouspensky's).

This is not a review of the book. It is a review of the easily misunderstood 86 page article published under the name of "A New Model Of The Universe - by P.D. Ouspensky" by Kessinger Publishing and how it is fraudulently marketed (as though you would receive the entire book if you ordered the product) through Amazon.com.

I too was fooled into buying the 86 page "article" extracted from the full book. I concur with the review that is titled "WARNING". Make sure when you are trying to order this book that you are ordering the BOOK and not an extraction from the book, or ARTICLE, as the vendor's customer service representative explained to me. The "Look Inside" feature is not representative of what you will be receiving; it has all the chapters listed and even the first page of the BOOK. You must check the total number of pages in the Amazon description. If the total number of pages is 86, you should know that the vendor is not selling the book "A New Model of The Universe", the vendor is selling 1 chapter from the book (chapter 10 to be exact).

Good Luck.