The Cosmology of Man's Possible Evolution

Six lectures drawn from Ouspensky's manuscripts, now held at Yale University, presenting the cosmological half of the Fourth Way system — the complement to his psychological lectures. The talks cover the fundamental laws of the universe: the Law of Three forces, the Ray of Creation (a chain of worlds from the Absolute to the Moon), the Law of Seven and the law of octaves, the table of hydrogens, and the three octaves of radiation. Man is understood as an image of the world, created by the same laws, and self-study and cosmological study are shown to be inseparable. The later lectures turn to the human organism as a three-storied factory that transforms coarse matter into finer substances through three kinds of food — physical food, air, and impressions — and describe the two conscious shocks by which this transformation can be extended beyond its ordinary mechanical limit. Taken from manuscripts Ouspensky used in his London lectures in the 1930s, the text preserves his characteristic precision and serves as an essential technical companion to 'In Search of the Miraculous' and 'The Fourth Way'.