In search of the miraculous

by Ouspensky

  G. first of all showed us how to "stand stock-still" immediately at the command "stop," and to try not to move, not to look aside no matter what was happening, not to reply if anyone spoke, for instance if one were asked something or even unjustly accused of something.

  "The 'stop' exercise is considered sacred in schools," he said. "Nobody except the principal teacher or the person he commissions has the right to command a 'stop.' 'Stop' cannot be the subject of play or exercise among the pupils. You never know the position a man can find himself in. If you cannot feel for him, you do not know what muscles are tensed or how much. Meanwhile if a difficult tension is continued it can cause the rupture of some important vessel and in some cases it can even cause im­mediate death. Therefore only he who is quite certain in himself that he knows what he is doing can allow himself to command a 'stop.'

  "At the same time 'stop' demands unconditional obedience, without any hesitations or doubts. And this makes it the invariable method for studying school discipline. School discipline is something quite different from military discipline, for instance. In that discipline everything is mechanical and the more mechanical it is the better. In this everything should be conscious because the aim consists in awakening consciousness. And for many people school discipline is much more difficult than military discipline. There it is always one and the same, here it is always different.

  "But very difficult cases occur. I will tell you of one case in my own life. It was many years ago in Central Asia. We had put up a tent by the side of an arik, that is, an irrigation canal. And three of us were carrying things from one side of the arik to the other where our tent was. The water in the arik came up to our waists. I and another man had just come out on the bank with some things and were preparing to dress; the third man was still in the water. He dropped something in the water, we afterwards found out that it was an ax, and he was feeling about on the bottom with a stick. At this moment we heard from the tent a voice which called 'Stop!' We both stood stock- still on the bank as we were. Our comrade in the water was just within our field of vision. He was standing bending down towards the water and when he heard 'stop' he remained in that posture. One or two minutes passed by and suddenly we saw that the water in the arik was rising. Someone perhaps a mile away had opened a sluice to let water into the small arik. The water rose very rapidly and soon reached the chin of the man in the water. We did not know if the man in the tent knew that the water was rising. We could not call out to him, we could not even turn our heads to see where he was, we could not look at each other. I could only hear my friend breathing. The water began to rise very rapidly and soon the head of the man in the water was completely covered. Only one hand was raised supported by a long staff. Only this hand was to be seen. It seemed to me that a very long time passed by. At length we heard: 'Enough!' We both sprang into the water and dragged our friend out of it. He had been almost suffocated."

  We also very soon became convinced that the "stop" exercise was not at all a joke. In the first place it required us to be constantly on the alert, constantly ready to interrupt what we were saying or doing; and secondly it sometimes required endurance and determination of quite a special kind.

  "Stop" occurred at any moment of the day. Once during tea P., who was sitting opposite me, had raised to his lips a glass of hot tea, just poured out, and he was blowing on it. At this moment we heard "Stop" from the next room. P.'s face, and his hand holding the glass, were just in front of my eyes. I saw him grow purple and I saw a little muscle near his eye quiver. But he held onto the glass. He said afterwards that his fingers only pained him during the first minute, the chief difficulty afterwards was with his arm which was bent awkwardly at the elbow, that is,

  stopped halfway through a movement. But he had large blisters on his fingers and they were painful for a long time.

  Another time a stop caught Z. when he had just inhaled smoke from his cigarette. He said afterwards that never in his life had he experienced anything so unpleasant. He could not exhale the smoke and he sat with eyes full of tears and smoke slowly coming out of his mouth.

  "Stop" had an immense, influence on the whole of our life, on the understanding of our work and our attitude towards it. First of all, attitude towards "stop" showed with undoubted accuracy what anyone's attitude was to the work. People who had tried to evade work evaded "stop." That is, either they did not hear the command to "stop" or they said that it did not directly refer .to them. Or, on the other hand, they were always prepared for a "stop," they made no careless movements, they took no glasses of hot tea in their hands, they sat down and got up very quickly and so on. To a certain extent it was even possible to cheat with the "stop." But of course this would be seen and would at once show who was sparing himself and who was able not to spare himself, able to take the work seriously, and who was trying to apply ordinary methods to it, to avoid difficulties, "to adapt themselves." In exactly the same way "stop" showed the people who were incapable and undesirous of submitting to school discipline and the people who were not taking it seriously. We saw quite clearly that without "stop" and other exercises which accompanied it, nothing whatever could be attained in a purely psychological way.

  But later work showed us the methods of the psychological way.

  The chief difficulty for most people, as it soon appeared, was the habit of talking. No one saw this habit in himself, no one could struggle with it because it was always connected with some characteristic which the man considered to be positive in himself. Either he wanted to be "sincere," or he wanted to know what another man thought, or he wanted to help someone by speaking of himself or of others, and so on, and so on.

  I very soon saw that the struggle with the habit of talking, of speaking, in general, more than is necessary, could become the center of gravity of work on oneself because this habit touched everything, penetrated everything, and was for many people the least noticed. It was very curious to observe how this habit (I say "habit" simply for lack of another word, it would be more correct to say "this sin" or "this misfortune") at once took possession of everything no matter what a man might begin to do.

  In Essentuki at that time G. made us, among other things, carry out a small experiment in fasting. I had carried out experiments of this kind before and a good deal was familiar to me. But for many others the feeling of days which were endlessly long, of complete emptiness, of a kind of futility of existence, was new.

  "Well, now I clearly understand," said one of our people, "what we live for and the place that food occupies in our lives."

  But I personally was particularly interested in observing the place that talk occupied in life. In my opinion our first fast consisted in everybody talking without stopping for several days about the fast, that is, everybody spoke about himself. In this respect I remember very early talks with a Moscow friend about the fact that voluntary silence could be the most severe discipline to which a man could subject himself. But at that time we meant absolute silence. Even into this G. brought that wonderfully practical element which distinguished his system and his methods from anything I had known previously.

  "Complete silence is easier," he said, when I began once to tell him my ideas. "Complete silence is simply a way out of life. A man should be in the desert or in a monastery. We speak of work in life. And a man can keep silence in such a way that no one will even notice it. The whole point is that we say a good deal too much. If we limited ourselves to what is actually necessary, this alone would be keeping silence. And it is the same with everything else, with food, with pleasures, with sleep; with everything there is a limit to what is necessary. After this 'sin' begins. This is something that must be grasped, a 'sin' is something which is not necessary."

  "But if people abstain from everything that is unnecessary now, at once, what will the whole of life become like?" I said. "And how can they know what is necessary and what is not necessary?"

  "Again you speak in your own way," said G. "I was not talking of pe
ople at all. They are going nowhere and for them there are no sins. Sins are what keep a man on one spot if he has decided to move and if he is able to move. Sins exist only for people who are on the way or approaching the way. And then sin is what stops a man, helps him to deceive himself and to think that he is working when he is simply asleep. Sin is what puts a man to sleep when he has already decided to awaken. And what puts a man to sleep? Again everything that is unnecessary, everything that is not indispensable. The indispensable is always permitted. But beyond this hypnosis begins at once. But you must remember that this refers only to people in the work or to those who consider themselves in the work. And work consists in subjecting oneself volun­tarily to temporary suffering in order to be free from eternal suffering. But people are afraid of suffering. They want pleasure now, at once and forever. They do not want to understand that pleasure is an attribute of paradise and that it must be earned. And this is necessary not by reason of any arbitrary or inner moral laws but because if man gets pleasure before he has earned it he will not be able to keep it and pleasure will be turned into suffering. But the whole point is to be able to get pleasure and be able to keep it. Whoever can do this has nothing to learn. But

  the way to it lies through suffering. Whoever thinks that as he is he can avail himself of pleasure is much mistaken, and if he is capable of being sincere with himself, then the moment will come when he will see this."

  But I will return to the physical exercises we carried out at that time. G. showed us the different methods that were used in schools. Very interesting but unbelievably difficult were exercises in which a whole series of consecutive movements were performed in connection with taking the attention from one part of the body to another.

  For instance, a man sits on the ground with knees bent and holding his arms, with the palms of the hands close together, between his feet. Then he has to lift one leg and during this time count: om, om, om, om, om, om, om, om, om, up to the tenth om and then nine times om, eight times om, seven times om, and so on, down to one and then again twice om, three times om, and so on, and at the same time "sense" his right eye. Then separate the thumb and "sense" his left ear and so on and so on.

  It was necessary first to remember the order of the movements and "sensing," then not to go wrong in the counting, to remember the count of movements and sensing. This was very difficult but it did not end the affair. When a man had mastered this exercise and could do it, say, for about ten or fifteen minutes, he was given, in addition, a special form of breathing, namely, he must inhale while pronouncing om several times and exhale pronouncing om several times; moreover the count had to be made aloud. Beyond this there were still greater and greater complications of the exercise up to almost impossible things. And G. told us he had seen people who for days did exercises of this kind.

  The short fast of which I spoke was also accompanied by special exercises. In the first place G. explained at the beginning of the fast that the difficulty in fasting consisted in not leaving unused the substances which are prepared in the organism for the digestion of food.

  "These substances consist of very strong solutions," he said. "And if they are left without attention they will poison the organism. They must be used up. But how can they be used up if the organism gets no food? Only by an increase of work, an increase of perspiration. People make a tremendous mistake when they try to 'save their strength,' make fewer movements, and so on, when fasting. On the contrary it is necessary to expend as much energy as possible. Then fasting can be beneficial."

  And when we began our fast we were not left in peace for a single second. G. made us run in the heat, doing a round of two miles, or stand with extended arms, or mark time at the double, or carry out a whole series of curious gymnastic exercises which he showed us.

  And he, all the time, constantly said that these exercises we were doing were not real ones, but merely preliminary and preparatory exercises.

  One experiment in connection with what G. said about breathing and fatigue explained many things to me and chiefly it explained why it is so difficult to attain anything in the ordinary conditions of life.

  I had gone to a room where nobody could see me, and began to mark time at the double trying at the same time to breathe according to a particular count, that is, to inhale during a definite number of steps and exhale during a definite number. After a certain time when I had begun to tire I noticed, that is, to speak more correctly, I felt quite clearly, that my breathing was artificial and unreliable. I felt that in a very short time I would be unable to breathe in that way while continuing to mark time at the double and that ordinary normal breathing, very accelerated of course, without any count would gain the upper hand.

  It became more and more difficult for me to breathe and to mark time, and to observe the count of breaths and steps. I was pouring with sweat, my head began to turn round, and I thought I should fall. I began to despair of obtaining results of any kind and I had almost stopped when suddenly something seemed to crack or move inside me and my breathing went on evenly and properly at the rate I wanted it to go, but without any effort on my part, while affording me all the amount of air I needed. It was an extraordinarily pleasant sensation. I shut my eyes and continued to mark time, breathing easily and freely and feeling exactly as though strength was increasing in me and that I was getting lighter and stronger. I thought that if I could continue to run in this way for a certain time I should get still more interesting results because waves of a sort of joyful trembling had already begun to go through my body which, as I knew from previous experiments, preceded what I called the opening of the inner consciousness.

  But at this moment someone came into the room and I stopped.

  Afterwards my heart beat strongly for a long time, but not unpleasantly. I had marked time and breathed for about half an hour. I do not recommend this exercise to people with weak hearts.

  At all events this experiment showed me with accuracy that a given exercise could be transferred to the moving center, that is, that it was possible to make the moving center work in a new way. But at the same time I was convinced that the condition for this transition was extreme fatigue. A man begins any exercise with his mind; only when the last stage of fatigue is reached can the control pass to the moving center. This explained what G. had said about "super-efforts" and made many of his later requirements intelligible.

  But afterwards, however much I tried I did not succeed in repeating the experiment, that is to say, in evoking the same sensations. It is true that the fast had come to an end and that the success of my experiment had been, to a considerable extent, connected with it.

  When I told G. about this experiment he said that without general work, that is, without work on the whole organism, such things could only succeed by chance.

  Later on I several times heard descriptions of experiences very similar to mine from people who were studying dances and dervish movements with G.

  The more we saw and realized the complexity and the diversity of methods of work on oneself, the clearer became for us the difficulties of the way. We saw the indispensability of great knowledge, of immense efforts, and of help such as none of us either could or had the right to count upon. We saw that even to begin work on oneself in any serious form was an exceptional phenomenon needing thousands of favorable inner and outward conditions. And the beginning gave no guarantee for the future. Each step required an effort, each step needed help. The possibility of attaining anything seemed so small in comparison with the difficulties that many of us lost the desire to make efforts of any kind.

  This was an inevitable stage through which everybody passes until they have learned to understand that it is useless to think of the possibility or impossibility of big and distant achievements, and that a man must value what he gets today without thinking of what he may get tomorrow.

  But certainly the idea of the difficulty and the exclusiveness of the way was right. And at different times questions arose out of it which
were put to G.:

  "Can it be possible that there is any difference between us and those people who have no conception of this system?"—"Must we understand that people who are not passing along any of the ways are doomed to turn eternally in one and the same circle, that they are merely 'food for the moon,' that they have no escape and no possibilities?"—"Is it correct to think that there are no ways outside the ways; and how is it arranged that some people, much better people perhaps, do not come across a way, while others, weak and insignificant, come into contact with the possibilities of a way?"

  On one occasion while talk was proceeding on these subjects, to which we were constantly returning, G. began to talk in a somewhat different way to what he had done before, because he had previously always insisted on the fact that outside the ways there was nothing.

  "There is not and there cannot be any choice of the people who come into touch with the 'ways.' In other words, nobody selects them, they select themselves, partly by accident and partly by having a certain hunger. Whoever is without this hunger cannot be helped by accident. And whoever has this hunger very strongly can be brought by accident to the beginning of a way in spite of all unfavorable circumstances."

  "But what of those who were killed and who died from disease in the war for instance?" someone asked. "Could not many of them have had this hunger? And how then could this hunger have helped?"

  "That is an entirely different thing," said G. "These people came under a general law. We do not speak of them and we cannot. We can only speak of people who, thanks to chance, or fate, or their own cleverness, do not come under a general law, that is, who stay outside the action of any general law of destruction. For instance it is known through statistics that a certain definite number of people have to fall under trams in Moscow during the year. Then if a man, even one with a great hunger, falls under a tram and the tram crushes him we can no longer speak of him from the point of view of work on the ways. We can speak only of those who are alive and only while they are alive. Trams or war—they are exactly the same thing. One is merely larger, the other smaller. We are speaking of those who do not fall under trams.