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Ouspensky was born in Moscow. In 1890, he was studying in the Second Moscow Gymnasium, a government school attended by boys from ten to eighteen. At the age of sixteen, he was expelled from school for painting graffiti on the wall in plain sight of a visiting inspector to see; thereafter, he would be more or less on his own. In 1906, he was working in the editorial office of the Moscow daily paper The Morning. In the autumn of 1913, before the beginning of World War I, he journeyed to the East in search of the miraculous but returned to Moscow shortly after the beginning of the great world war. There he met Gurdjieff and took in Mme Sophie Grigorievna Maximenko as his wife but he had a mistress by the name of Anna Ilinishna Butkovsky.

His first book, The Fourth Dimension, appeared in 1909; his second book, Tertium Organum, in 1912; and A New Model of the Universe in 1931. This last work discusses the idea of esotericism. He also wrote the novel Strange Life of Ivan Osokin, which explored the concept of recurrence or eternal return. He traveled in Europe and the East ... India, Ceylon, and Egypt ... in his search for knowledge. After his return to Russia and his introduction to Gurdjieff in 1915, Ouspensky spent the next few years studying with him. According to Osho, when Ouspensky went to Gurdjieff for the first time, the latter was but an unknown fakir and Ouspensky made him well-known to his own reading public.

Denying the ultimate reality of motion in his book Tertium Organum, he also negates Aristotle's Logical Formula of Identification of "A is A" and finally concludes in his "higher logic" that A is both A and not-A without specifying that in Aristotle's formula A can be both A and not A but not at the same time.

Unbeknown to Ouspensky, a Russian émigré by the name of Nicholas Bessarabof took a copy of Tertium Organum to America and placed it in the hands of the architect Claude Bragdon who could read Russian and was interested in the fourth dimension. Tertium Organum was rendered into English by Bragdon who had incorporated his own design of the hypercube into the Rochester Chamber of Commerce building. Bragdon also published the book and the publication was such a success that it was finally taken up by Alfred A. Knopf. At the time, in the early 1920s, Ouspensky's whereabouts were unknown until Bragdon located him in Constantinople and paid him some back royalties.

Ouspensky's lectures in London were attended by such literary figures as Aldous Huxley, T. S. Eliot, Gerald Heard and other writers, journalists and doctors. His influence on the literary scene of the 20s and 30s of the 20th century as well as on the Russian avant-garde was immense but still very little known.

Ouspensky also provided an original discussion of the nature and expression of sexuality in his A New Model of the Universe; among other things, he draws a distinction between erotica and pornography.

During his years in Moscow, Ouspensky wrote for several newspapers and was particularly interested in the then-fashionable idea of the fourth dimension. His first published work was titled The Fourth Dimension and he explored the subject along the ideas prevalent at the time in the works of Charles H. Hinton, the fourth dimension being an extension in space. It was not until after the work of Albert Einstein and the Theory of Relativity that space-time as a fourth dimension came into vogue. Ouspensky treats time as a fourth dimension only indirectly in a novel he wrote titled Strange Life of Ivan Osokin where he also explores the theory of eternal recurrence.

After the Bolshevik revolution, Ouspensky travelled to London by way of Istanbul.G.R.S. Mead became interested in the fourth dimension and Lady Rothermore, wife of the press magnate, was willing to spread the news of Ouspenky's Tertium Organum, while Ouspensky's acquaintance A.R. Orage was telling others about Ouspensky. By order of the British government, Gurdjieff was not allowed to settle down in London. Finally, he went to France with a considerable sum of money raised by Ouspensky and his friends and settled down near Paris at the Prieuré in Fontainbleau, Avon. It was during this time, after Gurdjieff founded his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in France, that Ouspensky came to the conclusion that he was no longer able to understand his former teacher and made a decision to discontinue association with him. Nevertheless, he wrote about Gurdjieff's teachings in a book originally entitled Fragments of an Unknown Teaching, only published posthumously in 1947 under the title In Search of the Miraculous. While this volume has been criticized by some of those who have followed Gurdjieff's teachings as only a partial representation of the totality of his ideas, it nevertheless provides what is probably the most concise explanation of the material that was included. This is in sharp contrast to the writings of Gurdjieff himself, such as Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson, where the ideas and precepts of Gurdjieff's teachings are found very deeply veiled in allegory. It is also important to note that Ouspensky did receive permission from Gurdjieff for the publication of In Search of the Miraculous, something that was seemingly withheld from almost every other student of Gurdjieff, even in instances where the material being written about was much less complete or clear.

He died in Lyne Place, Surrey. Shortly after his death in 1947, The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution was published, together with In Search of the Miraculous. Transcripts of certain of his lectures were published under the title of The Fourth Way in 1957; largely a collection of question and answer sessions, the book details important concepts, both introductory and advanced, for students of these teachings.

Ouspensky's papers are held in the archives of Yale University Library.

After Ouspensky broke away from Gurdjieff, he taught the "Fourth Way", as he understood it, to his independent groups.

Fourth Way

There are three recognized ways of self-development generally known in esoteric circles. These are the Way of the Fakir, dealing exclusively with the physical body, the Way of the Monk, dealing with the emotions, and the Way of the Yogi, dealing with the mind. What is common about the three ways is that they demand complete seclusion from the world. According to Gurdjieff, there is a Fourth Way which does not demand its followers to abandon the world. The work of self-development takes place right in the midst of ordinary life. Gurdjieff called his system a school of the Fourth Way where a person learns to work in harmony with his physical body, emotions and mind. Ouspensky picked up this idea and continued his own school along this line.

P.D. Ouspensky made the term "Fourth Way" and its use central to his own teaching of the ideas of Gurdjieff. He greatly focused on Fourth Way schools and their existence throughout history.

Students

Some of his students included, among others:

• Rodney Collin

• Maurice Nicoll

• Robert S de Ropp

• Kenneth Walker

• Aldous Huxley

Self-remembering

Ouspensky personally confessed the difficulties he was experiencing with self-remembering, a technique to which he had been introduced by Gurdjieff himself. Gurdjieff explained to him this was the missing link to everything else. While in Russia, Ouspensky himself experimented with the technique with a certain degree of success and in his lectures in London and America, he emphasized its practice. The technique requires a division of attention, so that a person not only pays attention to what is going on in the exterior world but also in the interior. The psychiatrist Dr. Sjoernval who was also a follower of Gurdjieff in Russia mentioned to Ouspensky that this was what professor Wundt meant by apperception. Ouspensky refused to believe it. Gurdjieff explained the Rosicrucian principle that in order to bring about a result or manifestation, three things are necessary. With self-remembering and self-observation two things are present. The third one is explained by Ouspensky in his tract on Conscience: it is the non-expression of negative emotions.

Self-Knowledge

According to Beryl Pogson, author of The Work Life, "...the only real poverty is lack of self-knowledge."