In Search of the Miraculous

there were nice people connected with these schools, but I did not feel they

had real knowledge. Others which are usually described as "yogi schools"

and which are based on the creation of trance states had, in my eyes,

something of the nature of "spiritualism." I could not trust them;

all their achievements were either self-deception or what the Orthodox

mystics (I mean in Russian monastic literature) called "beauty," or allurement.

There was another type of school, with which I was unable to make

contact and of which I only heard. These schools promised very much but

they also demanded very much. They demanded everything at once. It would

have been necessary to stay in India and give up thoughts of returning to

Europe, to renounce all my own ideas, aims, and plans, and proceed along a

road of which I could know nothing beforehand.

These schools interested me very much and the people who had been in

touch with them, and who told me about them, stood out distinctly from the

common type. But still, it seemed to me that there ought to be schools of a

more rational kind and that a man had the right, up to a certain point, to

know where he was going.

Simultaneously with this I came to the conclusion that whatever the name

of the school: occult, esoteric, or yogi, they should exist on the ordinary

earthly plane like any other kind of school: a school of painting, a school of

dancing, a school of medicine. I realized that thought of schools "on another

plane" was simply a sign of weakness, of dreams taking the place of real

search. And I understood then that these dreams were one of the principal

obstacles on our possible way to the miraculous.

On the way to India I made plans for further travels. This time I

wanted to begin with the Mohammedan East: chiefly Russian Central Asia

and Persia. But nothing of this was destined to materialize.

From London, through Norway, Sweden, and Finland, I arrived in

Petersburg, already renamed "Petrograd" and full of speculation and patriotism. Soon afterwards I went to Moscow and began editorial work for the newspaper to which I had written from India. I stayed there about six weeks,

but during that time a little episode occurred which was connected with

many things that happened later.

One day in the office of the newspaper I found, while preparing for the

next issue, a notice (in, I think, The Voice of Moscow) referring to the

scenario of a ballet, "The Struggle of the Magicians," which belonged, as it

said, to a certain "Hindu." The action of the ballet was to take place in India and give a complete picture of Oriental magic including fakir miracles,

sacred dances, and so on. I did not like the excessively jaunty tone of the

paragraph, but as Hindu writers of ballet scenarios were, to a certain extent,

rare in Moscow, I cut it out and put it into my paper, with the slight addition

that there would be everything in the ballet that cannot be found in real India

but which travelers go there to see.

Soon after this, for various reasons, I left the paper and went to

Petersburg.

There, in February and March, 1915, I gave public lectures on my travels

in India. The titles of these lectures were "In Search of the Miraculous" and

"The Problems of Death." In these lectures, which were to serve as an

introduction to a book on my travels it was my intention to write, I said that

in India the "miraculous" was not sought where it ought to be sought, that all

ordinary ways were useless, and that India guarded her secrets better than

many people supposed; but that the "miraculous" did exist there and was

indicated by many things which people passed by without realizing their

hidden sense and meaning or without knowing how to approach them. I

again had "schools" in mind.

In spite of the war my lectures evoked very considerable interest. There

were more than a thousand people at each in the Alexandrovsky Hall of the

Petersburg Town Duma. I received many letters; people came to see me; and

I felt that on the basis of a "search for the miraculous" it would be possible to unite together a very large number of people who were no longer able to

swallow the customary forms of lying and living in lying.

After Easter I went to give these lectures in Moscow. Among people

whom I met during these lectures there were two, one a musician and the

other a sculptor, who very soon began to speak to me about a group in

Moscow which was engaged in various "occult" investigations and

experiments and directed by a certain G., a Caucasian Greek, the very

"Hindu," so I understood, to whom belonged the ballet scenario men-

tioned in the newspaper I had come across three or four months before this. I

must confess that what these two people told me about this group and what

took place in it; all sorts of self-suggested wonders, interested me very little.

I had heard tales exactly like this many times before and I had formed a

definite opinion concerning them.

Ladies who suddenly see "eyes" in their rooms which float in the air and