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

way. You must know the person to whom you are explaining theconditions, and put it so that he will say 'but I hate beastly secretthings like that. . .' or whatever it may be.MR. M. Will you explain how it is possible for a man to live co-existentlives simultaneously in two time-places at the same time?MR. O. There are many things that look impossible, but that is becauseour thinking apparatus is not good enough to think about such things.It simplifies things too much. These problems need mathematicalthinking. For instance, we cannot think about time as a curve, but onlyas a straight line. If we could think of time as curve and all that thatimplies, this question of yours would not arise. In this case we are inexactly the same position as plane-beings trying to think of a threedimensionalworld. Really there is no problem of this kind. Theproblem is the structure of our own mind. If one could think throughhigher centres (which means getting the third and fourth states ofconsciousness, which is the aim of all our work) problems of futurelife, absurdities like this time question and so on do not arise. Asthings are we can only make theories. We know more or less how wecan approach them, but we can know nothing.But about this question of former lives, I think some people canremember something, although only in very rare cases, since thisimplies already a certain definite degree of development. Ordinary man1, 2 and 3 has no apparatus for such memory. Essence is mechanical. Itdoes not live by itself; it has no special thinking apparatus, but has tothink through personality, and personality has no experience.MR. M. Can a man be No. 5 in one life and No. 3 in another simultaneously?MR. O. I really do not know. One cannot become No. 5 at once; onehas to approach slowly, and if a man develops into No. 5 outsideschool, then it is a very slow process, so I do not think the differencewould be so big from one life to another. I can say only one thingabout it. I think that if one knows consciously, fully, can more or lessspeak about this idea of recurrence and accepts it, then one cannotfully forget it next time. So if you accept it and know it in one life,there is a great chance of remembering much more next time. We haveno experience, but if you think—in literature, history, philosophy—people return again and again to this idea. They never fully forget it.But to fit it into a three-dimensional world is very difficult. It needs a