Durable results

 

We can have no fate in the real sense of the word any more than we can have will. If we had will, then through this alone we should know the future, because we should then make our future, and make it such as we want it to be. If we had fate, we could also know the future, because fate corresponds to type. If the type is known, then its fate can be known, that is, both the past and the future. But accidents cannot be foreseen. Today a man is one, tomorrow he is different: today one thing happens to him, tomorrow another."

"But are you not able to foresee what is going to happen to each of us," somebody asked, "that is to say, foretell what result each of us will reach in work on himself and whether it is worth his while to begin work?"

"It is impossible to say," said G. "One can only foretell the future for men. It is impossible to foretell the future for mad machines. Their direction changes every moment. At one moment a machine of this kind is going in one direction and you can calculate where it can get to, but five minutes later it is already going in quite a different direction and all your calculations prove to be wrong...

... It sounds paradoxical but we have every right to say that we know our future. It will be exactly the same as our past has been. Nothing can change of itself...

...There was a question here about the future life, about how to create it, how to avoid final death, how not to die.

 

For this it is necessary 'to be' If a man is changing every minute, if there is nothing in him that can withstand external influences, it means that there is nothing in him that can withstand death. But if he becomes independent of external influences, if there appears in him something that can live by itself, this something may not die. In ordinary circumstances we die every moment. External influences change and we change with them, that is, many of our I's die. If a man develops in himself a permanent I that can survive a change in external conditions, it can survive the death of the physical body. The whole secret is that one cannot work for a future life without
working for this one. In working for life a man works for death, or rather, for immortality.

 

 

Excerpt taken from In Search of the Miraculous by P. D. Ouspensky,P. 99-100, pub. Paul H. Crompton Ltd, 2004.