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

carnivorous, herbivorous, omnivorous, etc.—or by the way they areborn, whether alive or in the form of eggs and so on. There are manydifferent divisions and all really are unsatisfactory because they mixmany things and there is no one general principle for division. In thesystem there is one definite principle for classification. At first it lookstoo simple and people are inclined to think it means that manydifferent beings can belong to the same category according to thisdivision. Really, however, it is very definite and very strict in spite ofbeing simple.All living beings are divided by three principles:what they eat;what air they breathe;in what medium they live.If you understand this right you will see that there are no twoidentical beings on earth. They are all different. There are no twodifferent animals which eat the same things, breathe the same air andlive in the same medium. In order to see it, it is necessary to think welland find many examples.I remember a conversation I had a little while ago with a doctorwho came down to see me at Lyne (he was not in the system). Wewere walking round and went to look at the pigs. He told me hownear the pig is to man—perhaps the nearest animal—because of thelength of its intestines and many other things; because it is omnivorousand so on. Really he was terribly mistaken; the pig is very far fromman. It eats quite different things. Man will die if he eats what a pigcan eat. The pig can easily live on pure ptomaines for a long time. Soyou see it is dangerous to accept ordinary scientific classifications.Man is limited in what he can eat, to hydrogen 768. All other animalscan eat something different from that or cannot eat all of that. Evenanimals as alike as the donkey and the horse are really quite different.They cannot live on exactly the same diet. The horse will probably dieon the donkey's diet and the donkey will get too fat on the horse's diet.MR. H. I do not understand what you mean by 'what air they breathe'.MR. O. Just that. Take, for instance, the bee. The bee's food is higherthan ours, but the bee can live in the hive where man could not live.He could not live in that air.MR. S. Most birds can eat the same things, can't they? A lot ofdifferent birds eat worms.