A Record of Meetings held by P.D. Ouspensky - HolyBooks.com

understand the necessity of objective morality. If he understands thesethree things, then he will find a basis for distinguishing what is rightand what is wrong in relation to each separate thing, and will distinguishwhat is criminal and what is not. Because there are definitestandards, if one starts rightly. The whole thing is to start from theright point of view. If one starts from a wrong point of view, one willnot find anything.All this needs a long talk and we will continue this conversation.But now try to connect all I have said with what you have heardbefore.Next Thursday you will begin the reading of Fragments where Idescribe how I met the system, the first years of work, and the systemitself.***M R. B. How can we trust our own sense of right and wrong?MR. O. You cannot trust or mistrust. It is there. So that is not thequestion. You can only hesitate and be in doubt in relation to theobject. Certainly, without knowledge, without development, withoutconsciousness you cannot say definitely whether it is right or wrong;but you may be on the way to it.***MR. O. Before we go on with questions I want to say why I made thisrule for new people about interest in criminal politics, and explainwhat I call criminal politics. Certainly it is easy to say, like Mr. G—said, 'I don't know anything about bolsheviks.' Unfortunately Iknow. The fact is that when power got into the hands of this party,which was a very small and despised party, all evolution stopped. Inthe last twenty years Russia has produced not a single book, not asingle picture. If there are people who write or paint there, they arepeople who have been doing it before the revolution. And I saw whathappened. I saw what an enormous progress Russia had made in thetwenty years preceding the revolution—it was quite a different country;literature, art, everything was developing rapidly. And now all this hasstopped. At the same time there are plenty of words and promises. Onthe economic side: the rich are destroyed, but the poor are much worseoff than before. They are slaves. So everybody is in a worse positionthan before, except government spies.I see that certain things I said last time were misunderstood. For