"So individually we are not important for the universe at all. We cannot speak even about humanity in relation to the universe – we can only speak about organic life. As I said, we are part of organic life, and organic life plays a certain part in the solar system, but it is a very big thing compared with us. We are used to thinking of ourselves individually, but very soon we lose this illusion. It is useful to think about different scales; take a thing on a wrong scale and you lose your way."
P.D. Ouspensky, a Russian philosopher and mystic, often explored ideas about human consciousness, the nature of existence, and our place in the cosmos, heavily influenced by his work with G.I. Gurdjieff and his own studies in esoteric thought. In the passage above, he’s addressing the concept of scale and perspective, urging us to reconsider our inflated sense of individual importance within the vastness of the universe.
What Ouspensky means here is that, on a cosmic level, individual human beings—or even humanity as a collective—are essentially insignificant. He suggests that we tend to overemphasize our personal roles or value in the grand scheme, but this is an illusion born from our limited, self-centered perception. Instead, he shifts the focus to "organic life" as a broader category, which includes humanity but also encompasses all living things on Earth. This organic life, as a whole, has a function or role within the solar system, but that role is still minor compared to the immense scale of the universe itself.
When he says, "We are part of organic life, and organic life plays a certain part in the solar system, but it is a very big thing compared with us," he’s pointing out a hierarchy of scale. Individuals are tiny fragments within the larger system of organic life, which itself is just a small piece of the solar system’s workings. The universe operates on magnitudes far beyond our personal existence, and we’re prone to misunderstanding reality when we judge it solely from our narrow, human perspective.
The idea of "thinking about different scales" is key. Ouspensky is encouraging a mental shift: if we evaluate ourselves or our problems using the wrong frame of reference—say, treating our individual lives as cosmically central—we distort the truth and "lose our way." For example, a personal crisis might feel monumental to you or me, but it’s trivial when viewed against the backdrop of planetary or universal processes. By adjusting our sense of proportion, we can shed the illusion of individual significance and align ourselves with a more accurate understanding of reality.
This reflects Ouspensky’s broader teachings, particularly his emphasis on self-observation and awakening from mechanical habits of thought. Here, he’s challenging the ego’s tendency to inflate its own importance and inviting us to see ourselves as part of a much larger, interconnected system—one where organic life serves a purpose, but that purpose isn’t centered on any single one of us. It’s a humbling perspective, meant to reorient our thinking toward the bigger picture.
Excerpt: All and Everything – G.I. Gurdjief
“How is it possible to reconcile the fact that a man is terrified at a small timid mouse, the most frightened of all creatures, and of thousands of other similar trifles which might never even occur, and yet experiences no terror before the inevitability of his own death?
In any case, to explain such an obvious contradiction by the action of the famous human will – is impossible.
When this contradiction is considered openly, without any preconceptions, that is to say, without any of the ready-made notions derived from the wiseacring of various what are called “authorities,” who in most cases have become such thanks to the naivete and “herd instinct” of people, as well as from the results, depending on abnormal education, which arise in our mentation, then it becomes indubitably evident that all these terrors, from which in man there does not arise the impulse, as we said, to hang himself, are permitted by Nature Herself to the extent in which they are necessary for the process of our ordinary existence.
And indeed without them, without all these, in the objective sense, as is said, “fleabites,” but which appear to us as “unprecedented terrors,” there could not proceed in us any experiencings at all, either of joy, sorrow, hope, disappointment, and so on, nor could we have all those cares, stimuli, strivings, and, in general, all kinds of impulses, which constrain us to act, to attain to something, and to strive for some aim.
It is just this totality of these automatic, as they might be called, “childish experiencings” arising and flowing in the average man which on the one hand make up and sustain his life, and on the other hand give him neither the possibility nor the time to see and feel reality.
If the average contemporary man were given the possibility to sense or to remember, if only in his thought, that at a definite known date, for instance, tomorrow, a week, or a month, or even a year or two hence, he would die and die for certain, what would then remain, one asks, of all that had until then filled up and constituted his life?
Everything would lose its sense and significance for him. What would be the importance then of the decoration he received yesterday for long service and which had so delighted him, or that glance he recently noticed, so full of promise, from the woman who had long been the object of his constant and unrewarded longing, or the newspaper with his morning coffee, and that deferential greeting from the neighbor on the stairs, and the theater in the evening, and rest and sleep, and all his favorite things – of what account would they all be?
They would no longer have that significance which had been given them before, even if a man knew that death would overtake him only in five or six years.
In short, to look at his own death, as is said, “in the face” the average man cannot and must not – he would then, so to say, “get out of his depth” and before him, in clear-cut form, the question would arise: “Why then should we live and toil and suffer?”
Precisely that such a question may not arise, Great Nature, having become convinced that in the common presences of most people there have already ceased to be any factors for meritorious manifestations proper to three centered beings, had providentially wisely protected them by allowing the arising in them of various consequences of those nonmeritorious properties unbecoming to three centered beings which, in the absence of a proper actualization, conduce to their not perceiving or sensing reality.
And Great Nature was constrained to adapt Herself to such an, in the objective sense, abnormality, in consequence of the fact that thanks to the conditions of their ordinary life established by people themselves the deteriorating quality of their radiations required for Higher Common Cosmic Purposes insistently demanded , for the maintenance of equilibrium, an increase of the quality of the arisings and existings of these lives.
Whereupon it follows that life in general is given to people not for themselves, but that this life is necessary for the said Higher Cosmic Purposes, in consequence of which Great Nature watches over this life so that it may flow in a more or less tolerable form, and takes care that it should not prematurely cease.
Do not we, people, ourselves also feed, watch over, look after, and make the lives of our sheep and pigs as comfortable as possible?
Do we do all this because we value their lives for the sake of their lives?
No! We do all this in order to slaughter them one fine day and to obtain the meat we require, with as much fat as possible.
In the same way Nature takes all measures to ensure that we shall live without seeing the terror, and that we should not hang ourselves, but live long; and then, when we are required, She slaughters us.
Under the established conditions of the ordinary life of people, this has now already become an immutable law of Nature.
There is in our life a certain very great purpose and we must all serve this Great Common Purpose – in this lies the whole sense and predestinations of our life.
All people without exception are slaves of this “Greatness,” and all are compelled willy-nilly to submit, and to fufill without condition or compromise, what has been predestined for each of us by his transmitted heredity and his acquired Being.
Now, after all that I have said, returning to the chief theme of the lecture read here today, I wish to refresh your memory about what has several times been referred to in defining man – the expressions “real man” and a “man in quotation marks,” and in conclusion, to say the following.
Although the real man who has already acquired his own “I” and also the man in quotation marks who has not, are equally slaves of the said “Greatness,” yet the difference between them, as I have already said, consists in this, that since the attitude of the former to his slavery is conscious, he acquires the possibility, simultaneously with serving the all-universal Actualizing, of applying a part of his manifestations according to the providence of Great Nature for the purpose of acquiring for himself “imperishable Being”; whereas the latter, not cognizing his slavery, serves during the flow of the entire process of his existence exclusively only as a thing, which when no longer needed, disappears forever.
© 2011 évolution exponentielle: Concerning the Jews: An Inquiry into Social Function and Historical Persecution