"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.
Gurdjieff on Human Consciousness, Mortality, and the Larger Purpose of Life
An interpretive summary of the preceding passage from All and Everything
G.I. Gurdjieff begins with a striking paradox: human beings can be terrified by insignificant things—a mouse, a social embarrassment, a disappointment—while remaining relatively unmoved by the certainty that they themselves will eventually die. He suggests that this contradiction reveals something fundamental about ordinary human consciousness. We know intellectually that death is inevitable, but we generally do not experience that knowledge with its full emotional force. If we did, the ordinary concerns that occupy our lives might suddenly seem insignificant.
Imagine, Gurdjieff suggests, knowing with absolute certainty that one would die at a specific date in the near future. The pleasures, ambitions, disappointments, social recognition, romantic hopes, possessions, entertainments, and daily routines that ordinarily seem important would likely lose much of their significance. The question would inevitably arise: Why continue striving, working, worrying, and suffering if everything will ultimately come to an end?
Gurdjieff therefore proposes that Nature has, in effect, protected human beings from continually confronting this terrifying awareness. Instead, we become absorbed in countless smaller experiences: fear, desire, hope, disappointment, ambition, pleasure, anxiety, affection, jealousy, and anticipation. Although these experiences may appear trivial when viewed objectively, they provide the emotional energy that keeps ordinary human life moving. They give us reasons to act, goals to pursue, problems to solve, and pleasures to anticipate.
These experiences, however, have another consequence. Because we are continually absorbed in them, they prevent us from seeing reality with complete clarity. We become occupied with the immediate events of our lives and rarely step outside them to question the larger forces that determine our existence.
This leads Gurdjieff to one of his central ideas: most people live largely automatically. They imagine themselves to be autonomous individuals freely making decisions, yet their thoughts, emotions, desires, fears, and actions are heavily influenced by heredity, upbringing, social circumstances, habits, and instinct. The ordinary person therefore believes himself to possess a unified and independent "I" when, according to Gurdjieff, what actually exists is a collection of changing impulses and reactions.
Gurdjieff describes humanity as being subject to a larger universal process that he calls the Great Common Purpose. Human beings therefore do not exist solely for their own individual purposes. Their lives participate in processes larger than themselves, just as human beings maintain and care for animals while ultimately using those animals for purposes beyond the animals' own understanding.
This analogy leads to Gurdjieff's unsettling assertion that Nature similarly sustains human life, protects it from prematurely ending, and provides the conditions necessary for it to continue until its usefulness within the larger process is complete. Death, from this perspective, is not simply an accidental interruption of individual existence but part of a larger natural order.
Yet Gurdjieff does not regard this condition as hopeless. He distinguishes between what he calls the ordinary "man in quotation marks" and the "real man." The ordinary person remains largely unconscious of the forces governing him and therefore lives as a kind of involuntary slave to his conditioning. The more conscious person, by contrast, begins to recognize this slavery. He observes his own reactions, becomes aware of his automatic tendencies, and begins to develop a more stable sense of self—a genuine "I."
Paradoxically, Gurdjieff argues that recognizing one's lack of freedom is itself the beginning of freedom. The conscious person may remain subject to Nature and to the larger purposes of existence, but he is no longer completely unaware of that fact. His life can therefore acquire another dimension: instead of merely being carried along by the automatic processes of existence, he can consciously participate in them while simultaneously developing what Gurdjieff calls an "imperishable Being."
The deeper message of the passage, therefore, is that ordinary human life is sustained by a kind of necessary unconsciousness. Our fears, desires, ambitions, pleasures, and distractions keep us engaged with life and prevent the full awareness of mortality from overwhelming us. Yet the same mechanisms that allow us to function also keep us from seeing ourselves and reality clearly.
For Gurdjieff, genuine human development begins when a person becomes capable of stepping outside this automatic existence and observing it. To become conscious is to recognize that one's ordinary sense of autonomy may be largely illusory, that one's life participates in forces far greater than the individual self, and that death is an inseparable part of that larger order. The goal is not necessarily to escape the system, but to become conscious of one's place within it.
In this sense, Gurdjieff's fundamental question is not simply Why do we die? It is more profound: What does it mean to live consciously when we know that our individual existence is temporary and that we are participants in a reality vastly larger than ourselves?
© 2011 évolution exponentielle: Concerning the Jews: An Inquiry into Social Function and Historical Persecution