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

MR. O. Yes. That was from the ordinary point of view of organic andinorganic. In a limited sense it is true.MR. M. When a potato is baked, although it gains in intelligence onone scale, it loses on another, does it not?MR. O. Everything has to be paid for, you know. The potato pays forone thing with another thing. The same applies to us. If we want onething we have to pay for it by another thing.MR. M. Could these two types of intelligence be compared?MR. O. Which measure do you use? Yes, they are comparable, if youlike. In the one case it is simply reproduction, growth. The potato canproduce other potatoes. But the baked potato passes to another levelof existence, it sacrifices itself.There is a diagram relating to this problem, and I cannot reallyanswer your questions about different intelligence until we have had it.It is rather too long to give it now, but we will try to come to it soon.MRS. S. Surely a baked potato loses adaptability?MR. O. Yes, it does, but it is food for man, and this, for a vegetable, isalready a great step up.MRS. S. Is adaptability the thing it sacrifices?MR. O. It sacrifices its life. It shows you how everything must be paidfor. Nothing can be had for nothing.MRS. S. Can a school function as food in any way for men on a higherlevel?MR. O. No. It is necessary first to know what is meant by food.Secondly, school has nothing to do with it.MR. S. You said once that the origin of organic life was a series ofexperiments of which man was the last and most successful. Is itpossible to have these experiments in order and see what was addedeach time? Would not that be a correct and useful study of evolution?MR. O. That was my own description, not the system. There are toomany experiments to try to do this. But if you begin to study naturalscience, you will see such a wonderful profusion, even absurdity, inthese experiments; such strange insects, for instance, that you understandthey were just experiments to see how a certain principle couldwork. But it cannot be put in simple formulas. What is generally calledevolution does not exist; it cannot be observed and it could notproduce all this variety of things. Evolution or experiment, they areboth hypotheses.