Ouspensky on our lives in time

My friend Charles Sides writes me: “I thought the following quotations might be of interest to you as you are going through your journals.”

They are, and i think they will be of interest to many. From A Secret History of Consciousness:

P 48 Ouspensky realized that at any time our picture of ourselves is limited by the moment in which we see it, but that the ‘real’ individual is one’s life extended through time. Like Bergson, Ouspensky was aware that all we can study at any separate moment is a ‘snapshot’ of a person’s life, never the whole of it, which, like the rest of the world, is a constant process. And, of course, each snapshot is different. From birth to death, we are in a condition of constant change.

Pp 48-9 The key to higher consciousness, Ouspensky understood, lay in a changed perception of time, in an ability to escape the limitations of the present moment and see deeper into the past and future. Just as what is ‘behind’ us or ‘before’ us is still ‘there’ although we no longer occupy its space, in his heightened state Ouspensky could see that the past, which we believe to be obliterated, still exists, and that the future, which in our ‘normal’ state we believe has not yet happened, is already taking place. We are so used to the idea of ‘now’ being the only time we can be aware of that the idea that the past and the future are in some way ‘with us’ seems absurd.