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

School cannot be mechanical, so it must be under different laws. Itvery often happens that when people first hear about recurrence theythink everything recurs. But what would be the idea of school if itwere like that? If a school exists once in one form, that means that nexttime it will not be in the same place, at the same time, in the sameform. That must be understood. How it changes it is impossible to sayin general, but it cannot be the same thing or it would be mechanical,and mechanical is not school.MR. P . Then it means an individual who came across a school in onelife might not find it in the next?MR. O. He may find another, better one, or he may find nothing. Itdepends what he made of it. 'Came across' means nothing. He did not'come across' anything.MR. S. You said once that if man toyed with self-remembering and didnot take it seriously he would suffer consciously on the moon. Couldyou explain what that meant?MR. O. I remember what I said and I did not say 'toyed' with selfremembering.It is rather long to explain, but there is a possibility ofthat. Man can create a sort of half-consciousness which can pass to thesoul, and then the soul going to the moon may be aware of whathappens to it, but this occurs only in very rare cases when essence diesduring life. Then the soul can get some material from essence in thisway. Although there are many people, of course, who kill essence andare really dead in life, but that does not concern us.***Well, I will begin to speak about the new diagram. I must explainsome things before I give it to you.Very often questions are asked referring to animals. I always say thatman is not an animal. He is quite different. It is necessary to understandthat all living beings, all animals on the earth, including man, aredivided, from the system point of view, into three categories: threestoried,two-storied and one-storied. Man has three stories, animalshave two stories and more elementary animals, like earthworm, haveonly one story. So all living beings have three, two or one stories.These categories are different one from another and are under differentlaws.Then you know the usual classifications in the scientificsense, grouping living beings by families, species, by what they eat—