Meetings With Remarkable Men

by G. I. Gurdjieff

  For example, if he thinks about America and his thoughts are turned in the direction where, according to his notions, America lies, certain of his muscles, particularly, so to say, the fine ones, vibrate towards the same place; in other words, their entire tension strains in that direction.

  In the same way, if the thoughts of a man are turned towards the second floor of a house when he himself is on the first floor, certain of his muscles are strained and, as it were, raised upwards; in short, a movement of the thoughts in a definite direction is always accompanied by a tension of the muscles in the same direction.

  This phenomenon proceeds even among those who are aware of its existence and who try by all the means known to them to avoid it.

  Everyone has probably happened to see, in some theatre or circus or other public place, how various so-called Indian fakirs, conjurors, wonder-workers and other remarkable exponents of the secrets of supernatural knowledge, astonish people with their magical phenomena, finding hidden objects or performing some other action previously decided upon by the audience.

  In accomplishing these miraculous feats these magicians hold the hand of one of the spectators, who of course is thinking about the action decided on, and, simply by means of the unconscious indications or shocks received from the person’s hand, they ‘guess’ the action and carry it out.

  They can do this not because they possess some special knowledge, but merely because they know the secret of this property of man. Knowing this secret, anyone could do the same with a little practice.

  One has only to be able to concentrate one’s attention on the other person’s hand and catch its slight almost imperceptible movements. With practice and perseverance one can always succeed, like a magician, in guessing what has been thought of.

  For instance, if the idea is that the magician should pick up a hat lying on the table, then, even if the person knows the trick and tries hard to think about the shoes lying under the couch, he will still unconsciously be thinking about the hat, and the muscles which guide the magician will tense in that direction, as they are subject more to the sub-consciousness than to the consciousness.

  As I have said, Ekim Bey performed experiments of this sort on his friends in order to learn more about the human psyche and thus determine the causes of hypnotic influences.

  Among the experiments he made to accomplish this task he had set himself was a highly original one which astounded the uninitiated more than any of the fakirs’ tricks.

  He proceeded as follows:

  On a sheet of paper divided into squares he wrote the entire alphabet in order, and on the bottom line all the numbers from one to nine followed by nought. He prepared several such sheets and on each sheet he wrote the alphabet of a different language.

  Sitting at a table, he put one of the alphabet sheets in front of him, a little to the left; and with his right hand he took a pencil. On his left, just opposite the alphabet, he seated the subject of the experiment, for example, somebody who had asked him to tell his fortune. Then with his left hand Ekim Bey took the right hand of this person, and began to speak more or less as follows:

  ‘First of all I must know your name...’ and then, as if talking to himself, he continued slowly—‘the first letter of your name...’ and he placed on the alphabet the hand of the person wishing to know his fate.

  Thanks to the mentioned human property, when the hand passed over the letter with which the name began it gave an involuntary start.

  Ekim Bey, knowing the significance of this movement, perceived it and continued: ‘The first letter of your name is ...’ and he pronounced the letter over which the hand had trembled and wrote it down.

  Continuing in this way, he found out the next few letters of the name and, having done so, guessed the whole name; for example, having obtained the letters S, T, and E, he could tell that the name was Stephen.

  Then he said, ‘Your name is Stephen. Now I must find out how old you are,’ and he began to move the hand over the numbers.

  He then discovered whether the man was married or not, how many children there were, the name of each child, the name of his wife, the name of his greatest enemy, greatest friend and so on and so forth.

  After several of these miraculous guesses, his clients were so astonished that they forgot everything on earth and proceeded to tell Ekim Bey all he wanted to know, and, letting go their hand, he had only to repeat what they themselves had said. Then, whatever fantastic stuff he might tell them about their future, they believed it all and hung with awe on every word.

  Later, everyone on whom Ekim Bey had made this experiment went around talking about it on all possible occasions and, of course, made such extravagant additions about his powers that the listeners’ hair stood on end.

  And so, among those who knew and heard about him, an image was built up which gradually acquired the aura of a magician, and even his name was uttered in a whisper and with trepidation.

  Many people, not only Turks but also people from other countries, chiefly from Europe, began to write to him and pester him with all kinds of requests. Some begged him to foretell their future from their handwriting; others, to remedy their unrequited love; yet others to cure them from a distance of their chronic ailments. He received letters from pashas, generals, officers, mullahs, teachers, priests, merchants, and from women of every age, but especially from young women of all nationalities.

  In short, there were such heaps of these letters with different kinds of requests that, if Ekim Bey had wished to send even empty replies to each of the writers, he would have had to have no less than fifty secretaries.

  One day when I visited him in Scutari at his father’s estate on the shores of the Bosphorus, he showed me many of these letters and I remember how we almost split our sides with laughter at the naiveté and stupidity of people.

  He ultimately grew so weary of it all that he even gave up his well-loved work as a physician and left the places where he was known.

  Ekim Bey’s thorough knowledge of hypnotism and of all the automatic properties of the psyche of the ordinary man turned out to be very useful during one of our journeys, when he succeeded in getting us out of a very difficult situation into which we had fallen.

  Once, when Ekim Bey and I with several of our comrades were in the town of Yangishar in Kashgar, having one of our usual long rests, intending to go next into the valleys of the Hindu Kush Mountains, Ekim Bey received news from his uncle in Turkey that his father was failing rapidly and would probably not live long.

  This news disturbed Ekim Bey so much that he decided to interrupt his journey and return to Turkey as quickly as possible. in order to spend what little time remained with his beloved father.

  As these incessant wanderings from place to place under constant nervous strain had begun to weary me, and as I also wished to go and see my parents, I decided to break off my journey and travel as far as Russia with Ekim Bey.

  Taking leave of our comrades, we went through Irkeshtam towards Russia. After many adventures and a host of great difficulties, without following the usual roads from Kashgar, all of which went to Osh, we managed to reach the town of Andijan in the Ferghana region.

  We had decided to go through this once great region, because we wished to take advantage of the opportunity to inspect the ruins of several ancient towns, about which we had heard a great deal and which we expected to find chiefly by means of logical deductions from certain historical data.

  We had thus greatly lengthened our journey before we came out on to the main road near Andijan. In Margelan we bought our railway tickets to Krasnovodsk and were already seated in the train when we found, to our great distress, that we had not enough money for the rest of our trip nor even for the next day’s food. Moreover, during our travels through Kashgar our clothes had become so shabby that we were not fit to be seen in public, so money was also needed for buying clothes.

  We therefore decided not to go as far as Krasnovodsk, but to change trains at Cher
nyaevo and go to Taskhent, a large centre where we could send for money by telegraph and manage to live as best we could until it arrived.

  We did so. Having arrived at Tashkent and taken a room in a cheap hotel not far from the station, we first of all went to send off the telegrams and then, as this took almost all the money we had left, we went to the bazaar to sell our remaining possessions: rifles, watches, pedometer, compass, maps, in short, everything on which we could hope to raise any money at all.

  In the evening, while we were walking along the street and pondering on our situation, and wondering where the people to whom we had telegraphed might be and whether they would have the sense to remit the money immediately, without noticing it we reached Old Tashkent. We sat down in a Sart chaikhwia, continuing to ponder on what we would do if the money were delayed; and after long deliberation and examination of the various possibilities, we finally decided that, there in Tashkent, Ekim Bey should give himself out to be an Indian fakir and I a sword-swallower and a man who could consume any quantity of poisonous substances. And we made all kinds of jokes about it.

  The next morning the first thing we did was to go to the offices of a Tashkent newspaper, to the department which accepted advertisements and also took orders for all sorts of posters.

  The clerk there was a very friendly Jew who had recently arrived from Russia. After chatting with him a little, we arranged for advertisements to be inserted in all three of the Tashkent newspapers, and also ordered large posters announcing that a certain Indian fakir had arrived—I do not at the moment remember what Ekim Bey called himself, but I think it was Ganez or Ganzin—and that, with his assistant Salakan, on the following evening in the hall of a certain club, he would give a demonstration of hypnotic experiments and many other supernatural phenomena.

  The clerk also undertook to obtain the permission of the police for putting up the posters throughout the town, and by the next day posters about unprecedented miracles were already eyesores to the inhabitants of both New and Old Tashkent.

  By that time we had found two unemployed men who had come from the interior of Russia and, after sending them to the baths for a good scrub, we took them to our hotel and prepared them for hypnotic seances. We finally brought them into such a state of hypnosis that one could stick a large pin into their chests, sew up their mouths, and, placing them between two chairs with the head on one and the feet on another, put enormous weights on their stomachs; after which anyone in the audience who wished could come and pull a hair out of their heads, and so on and so forth.

  But what particularly astonished all the learned doctors, lawyers and others, was when Ekim Bey, by the means I have described, found out their names or their ages. In short, at the end of the first seance, besides a full cash-box, we received hundreds of invitations to dinner; and how the women of all classes of society made eyes at us—of this there is no need to speak.

  On three evenings in succession we gave seances, and, as we had earned more money than we needed, we left without delay to escape from our burdensome admirers.

  In writing this chapter, which has revived in my memory our various expeditions and wanderings through Asia, I have recalled by association the curious notion about this continent which is held by most Europeans.

  Having lived fifteen years uninterruptedly in the West, and being constantly in contact with people of all nationalities, I have come to the conclusion that no one in Europe knows or has any idea about Asia.

  Most people in Europe and America have the notion that Asia is a kind of indefinite, great continent adjoining Europe, and inhabited by savage or, at best, semi-savage groups of peoples who just happened to be there and go wild.

  Their ideas about its size are very vague; they are always ready to compare it with European countries and do not suspect that Asia is such a vast continent that several Europes could be put into it, and that it contains whole races of people about whom not only Europeans but even Asiatics themselves have never heard. Furthermore, among these ‘savage groups’ certain sciences, as, for example, medicine, astrology, natural science and so on, without any wiseacring or hypothetical explanations, have long since attained a degree of perfection which European civilization may perhaps reach only after several hundred years.

  IX

  PIOTR KARPENKO

  THIS CHAPTER WILL BE DEVOTED to Piotr Karpenko, friend of my childhood, who later became, by his own real achievements and not merely by diploma, a prominent mining engineer, and who is now deceased....

  May he attain the Kingdom of Heaven!

  It will be sufficient, I think, for portraying all the aspects of the individuality of Piotr Karpenko, and also for fulfilling my aim in this series of my writings, namely, that the reader should obtain instructive and really useful material, if I begin this chapter by describing the circumstances in which our first inner intimacy arose, and then relate several incidents which occurred on one of our expeditions, during which there befell, by the will of fate, the misfortune which led to his premature death.

  This close friendship of ours began when we were still boys. I will describe what happened in as much detail as possible, the more so as this may very well throw light on certain aspects of the psyche of young scamps in general, some of whom may later grow up to be unusual men.

  We were living in the town of Kars and at that time I was one of the choir-boys of the fortress cathedral.

  I must say first of all that, after my teacher Bogachevsky had left Kars and my first tutor, Dean Borsh, had gone away on leave of absence owing to illness, I was deprived of both of these men who were real authorities for me; and as there was also talk in my family about the possibility of returning to Alexandropol in the near future, I no longer wished to remain in Kars and began to think about going to Tiflis, where I had dreamed for a long time of joining what was called the Archdeacon’s Choir—a proposal which had often been made to me and which was very flattering to my youthful self-love.

  It was at this period of my life, while such dreams were still the centre of gravity of my as yet undeveloped thinking faculty, that early one morning there came running up to me. one of the choristers of the fortress cathedral, an army clerk, who had become my friend chiefly because I sometimes brought him good cigarettes, which I must confess I filched surreptitiously from my uncle’s cigarette case. Panting for breath, he told me that he had accidentally overheard a discussion between the commandant of the fortress, General Fadeef, and the chief of the mounted police about the arrest and cross-examination of several persons in connection with an affair relating to the artillery range, and my name had been mentioned as having possibly been mixed up in it.

  This news greatly alarmed me because I had, as is said, something on my conscience in connection with the artillery range, so, wishing to avoid any awkward possibilities, I decided not to delay my departure but to leave Kars the very next day.

  This incident of the artillery range, through which a factor was formed in my psyche for engendering remorse of conscience, and on account of which I hurriedly made my departure, was the cause of my intimate friendship with Piotr Karpenko.

  At that particular time I had a number of friends of my own age as well as others many years older. Among the former was one very agreeable boy, the son of a vodka manufacturer. His name was Riaouzov or Riaïzov, I do not remember which. He often used to invite me to his house and occasionally I would drop in without invitation.

  His parents spoiled him a great deal. He had his own separate room where we could prepare our lessons in comfort. On his writing-table there was almost always a plateful of freshly baked pies of flaky pastry, of which I was then very fond. But what was perhaps most important was that he had a sister about twelve or thirteen years old, who often came to his room when I happened to be there.

  A friendship sprang up between us and, without noticing it, I fell in love with her. It seemed that she also was not indifferent to me. In short, a silent romance began between us.

&nbs
p; Another friend of mine, the son of an artillery officer, also used to come there. And he, like us, was studying at home in order to enter some school, as he had not been admitted to the cadet corps, having been found a little deaf in one ear.

  This was Piotr Karpenko. He too was in love with the Riaouzov girl and she obviously liked him also. She was nice to him, it seems, because he often brought her sweets and flowers, and to me because I played the guitar well and was skilful at making designs on handkerchiefs, which she loved to embroider and say afterwards that she had designed herself.

  So here we were, both in love with this girl, and little by little, so to say, the jealousy of rivals began to flame in us.

  Once after evening service in the cathedral, where this breaker of hearts was also present, I thought out some plausible excuse and asked the choir-master’s permission to leave a little early, as I wished to meet her as she went out and accompany her home.

  At the doors of the cathedral I found myself face to face with my rival. Although hate for one another raged in both of us, we escorted our ‘lady’ home like chivalrous knights. But after we had left her I could no longer restrain myself and, picking a quarrel over something or other, I gave him a sound thrashing.

  The evening after the fight I went as usual with some of my comrades to the cathedral bell-tower. At that time there was no real bell-tower in the grounds of the fortress cathedral. It was just then being built and the bells were hung in a temporary wooden structure with a high roof, rather like an octagonal sentry-box. The space between thereof and the beams on which the bells hung was our ‘club’ where we met almost every day, and, sitting astride the beams or on the narrow ledge around the walls under the roof, we smoked, told anecdotes and even prepared our lessons. Later, when the permanent stone bell-tower was completed and the bells put in, this temporary one was presented by the Russian government to the new Greek church being built at that time, and there, it seems, it continues to serve as a bell-tower.