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How to Tap Into Limitless Energy and Vitality
Key Takeaways from The Strange Life of P.D. Ouspensky, by Colin Wilson
Matt Karamazov
May 22, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 17 minutes
📚 Hey, good evening!
Have you ever seen the movie The Usual Suspects?
Well, there was a man named George Ivanovich Gurdjieff who was basically the Kaiser Soze of 20th-century philosophy.
Nobody knows for sure where he came from.
His ways and mannerisms were mysterious and maddening to comprehend, his obscure teachings difficult to decipher.
But he exploded onto the European intellectual scene in the early-mid 20th century, and he made a massive, psyche-shattering impact on most of the people with whom he came into contact.
One of those people was P.D. Ouspensky, a Russian emigre who became transfixed by Gurdjieff’s presence and his ideas and traveled with him to spread his message throughout Europe, and later, the world.
Today’s book is the fascinating yet partly tragic story of Ouspensky’s life and work and what it means for all of us today.
It’s about the self-imposed mental slavery that people have succumbed to the world over, and the possibility of breaking free.
It’s about tapping into the vast reserves of energy and vitality that sit unused within each and every one of us, and you don’t have to believe a whole lot of spiritual mumbo jumbo in order to get a tremendous amount of value from reading this book.
Below, I share a short summary of The Strange Life of P.D. Ouspensky, as well as my complete book notes, along with some additional recommended reading.
There are lots of incredible insights to be found in this book, so let’s get into it!
If you sense that there’s more to life than waking up to a blaring alarm, going to work for 8 hours, coming home and watching Netflix, and then dying in your sleep, then you might love…
Today’s book is called The Strange Life of P.D. Ouspensky, by Colin Wilson, and in the summary and notes below, we’ll get into some of the key takeaways.
But here’s a quote from another fascinating, mysterious man named G.I. Gurdjieff (a partner of Ouspensky’s), which will give you some idea of what you’re in for:
“You think you know who you are and what you are; but you do not know either what slaves you now are, or how free you might become.”
That may seem a bit dramatic - I don’t think most people are “slaves” necessarily - but the main thrust of this book is that we are not nearly as alive as we could be.
We’re not experiencing the world as vividly and intensely as it’s possible to experience it, and there’s more energy and potential inside us that we can access, if only we exerted the will and the effort.
We simply don’t know how free it’s possible to become.
As always, my book notes and summary for this book are available on my Patreon, as well as my personal notes from more than 1,150+ other books. Updated monthly.
The support I’ve received on Patreon over the years has been nothing less than incredible. It honestly just started out as a way to make some extra money, but it’s become so much more than that.
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Everyone’s support helps, of course, but to have someone believe in me and my work to the extent that they do is just…I can’t even put it into words without swearing haha.
I appreciate the hell out of everyone who supports me on Patreon, which is basically what I’m saying, and I want to help you out too by sharing my best book notes and summaries on there for you to enjoy and profit from.
There are plenty of other cool rewards available too, but the main thing is that you get more than 1,150+ summaries and thousands of pages of book notes for just $1!
They’re updated monthly with all the new books I’ve been reading and taking notes on, but I do have to say that my earliest book notes need to be updated, and I’m working on that.
Just to be fully upfront with you guys.
I mean, they’re very good, but my notes from 2020 onwards are much more in-depth and complete than the ones from, say, 2015.
Back then, I was taking notes just for myself, but now I have to go back and make sure that other people can navigate them easily as well!
I should have them all updated by the end of the year, though, and my latest reads are updated monthly.
But again, thank you to everyone for either supporting me on Patreon or even considering doing so, and you can click here for my complete notes from today’s book and more than 1,150+ other books too.
Happy reading!
Most people are walking around in a fog - a daze - and they don’t even know that it’s possible to wake up, that it’s possible to be more fully alive, and to tap into a source of virtually limitless energy and potential.
That’s the message that was carried to Western Europe and America in the early 20th century by two of the most fascinating people most of us have never heard of: P.D. Ouspensky, and George Ivanovich Gurdjieff.
I don’t like the word “spiritual teachers” but that’s effectively what they were. Personally, I think people tend to get a bit silly when talking about stuff like that. You know what I mean! Their voices get all weird, they make all these strange movements with their hands for some reason…
Anyway, I don’t think there’s necessarily anything “mystical” about what Gurdjieff and Ouspensky had to teach. We, as human beings, with the mental, cognitive equipment we currently possess, already have the ability to access heightened states of consciousness, to actualize our potential, and to curate our own realities. Nothing “mystical” about it!
This book in particular is about the life’s work of Ouspensky himself, a Russian emigrant who joined forces with a mysterious man from the East, G.I. Gurdjieff, to shock the masses into wakefulness - into more life. It was written by one of my favorite writers, Colin Wilson, whose book The Outsider was a mega-bestseller in the 1950s and touched on similar themes.
Of course, all this isn’t to say that we can bend steel with our minds if we just “want it badly enough” or that we can make people fall in love with us or give us money or whatever. There are people everywhere who claim these kinds of things, but I think that most of them are full of shit and they know it.
All I’m saying is that it’s possible to be more fully alive than we are, and to achieve more than we ever thought possible. Most of us dream too small, act too rarely, and live too timidly.
You can believe what you want, of course, but I think there’s value in reading these kinds of books because they inspire us to become more than we are.
There is real human power available to you in this very moment, and while it may not be infinite, we surely haven’t come close to exploring its limits.
“Everything is alive. There is nothing dead, it is only we who are dead.”
“Of all we know in life, only in love is there a taste of the mystical, a taste of ecstasy. Nothing else in our life brings us so near to the limit of human possibilities, beyond which begins the unknown.”
“The British are notoriously impervious to ideas, but Ouspensky’s build-up had been impressive: a mysterious foreign philosopher who had been forced to flee from the Bolsheviks, had endured immense hardships, and then, against all the odds, had made his way to London to present his new message.
It all made him an irresistible attraction. And when the lectures turned out to be, in fact, startlingly new and strange, the conquest was complete.”
“Ouspensky’s English was heavily accented, but more or less accurate; Gurdjieff’s was purely functional, and he spoke in a kind of shorthand. When one lady asked what it would be like to be conscious in essence, he replied expressively: ‘Everything more vivid.’”
“But the strange thing was that however fatigued I might be when I began Gurdjieff’s difficult exercises I always drove back to London so full of energy that I had no desire to go to bed.”
“The more Walker saw of Gurdjieff, the more he experienced a sense of freedom. Gurdjieff seemed to demonstrate by personal example that man’s business is to be godlike.”
“As soon as we do anything with enthusiasm, with conviction, with total attention, life takes on a ‘real’ quality. Our greatest human mistake is to feel that certain things do not deserve enthusiastic attention. We have to learn that anything done with enthusiastic attention exalts us and increases our strength.”
“The sensation his experience left behind was obviously that our senses act as jailers, preventing us from grasping the reality that lies around us.”
“Men will not worry about death or a future, about the kingdom of heaven, about what may come with and after the cessation of life of the present body.
Each soul will feel and know itself to be immortal, will feel and know that the entire universe with all its good and all its beauty is for it and belongs to it forever.
The world peopled by men possessing cosmic consciousness will be as far removed from the world of today as this is from the world before the advent of self-consciousness.”
“Compared to what we ought to be we are only half awake.”
“We may feel that all our actions are mechanical, an automatic response to stimuli, until we consider the fact that we can think one thing rather than another.”
“Nietzsche said that happiness is the feeling that obstacles are being overcome, and this is again the secret of the peak experience.”
Currently, I don’t have a complete breakdown of The Strange Life of P.D. Ouspensky published on the Stairway to Wisdom (my library of expert book breakdowns), but below I’ve listed some similar breakdowns that you may enjoy instead.
When you become a member of the Stairway to Wisdom, you’ll gain access to more than 100+ book breakdowns like these ones here, as well as a premium weekly newsletter that will help you build the kind of life for yourself that you’ll love living.
If ordinary life usually seems a bit...well, ordinary...it may be because the way most human beings live their lives can be compared to an extraordinarily powerful jet airplane flying on only one engine.
27-Minute Read | 7,200 Words
Do you feel as though your highest potential still lies undeveloped, repressed within yourself? As though society's mold is stifling and oppressive? Colin Wilson's introduction to Gurdjieff will shock you into full aliveness.
25-Minute Read | 6,600 Words
Most people are not NEARLY as alive and awake as they COULD be. This classic book teaches why waking up is much closer and easier than you might think. You'll also learn to experience the gorgeous reality of everyday life that was always available if you only had eyes to see.
30-Minute Read | 7,700 Words
That’s it! I hope you found these book recommendations helpful, and I’ll be back with even more books for you very soon!
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With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your day!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
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