In Search of the Miraculous

their nature which otherwise they would never show. And at times it is a necessary

means for exposing a man's nature. So long as you are good to a man he is good to

you. But what will he be like if you scratch him a little?

"But this is not the chief thing; the chief thing is his own personal attitude, his own valuation of the ideas which he receives or has received, and his keeping or losing this valuation. A man may think for a long time and quite sincerely that he wants to work

and even make great efforts, and then he may throw up everything and even definitely

go against the work; justify himself, invent various fabrications, deliberately ascribe a wrong meaning to what he has heard, and so on."

"What happens to them for this?" asked one of the audience.

"Nothing—what could happen to them?" said G. "They are their own punishment.

And what punishment could be worse?

"It is impossible to describe in full the way work in a group is conducted," continued G. "One must go through it. All that has been said up to now are only hints, the true meaning of which will only be revealed to those who go on with the work and learn

from experience what 'barriers' mean and what difficulties they represent.

"Speaking in general the most difficult barrier is the conquest of lying. A man lies so much and so constantly both to himself and to others that he ceases to notice it.

Nevertheless lying must be conquered. And the first effort required of a man is to

conquer lying in relation to the teacher. A man must either decide at once to tell him

nothing but the truth, or at once give up the whole thing.

"You must realize that the teacher takes a very difficult task upon himself, the

cleaning and the repair of human machines. Of course he accepts only those machines

that are within his power to mend. If something essential is broken or put out of order

in the machine, then he refuses to take it. But even such machines, which by their

nature could still be cleaned, become quite hopeless if they begin to tell lies. A lie to the teacher, even the most insignificant, concealment of any kind such as the

concealment of something another has asked to be kept secret, or of something the man

himself has said to another, at once puts an end to the work of that man, especially if

he has previously made any efforts.

"Here is something you must bear in mind. Every effort a man makes increases the

demands made upon him. So long as a man has not made any serious efforts the

demands made upon him are very small, but his efforts immediately increase the

demands made upon him. And the greater the efforts that are made, the greater the new

demands.

"At this stage people very often make a mistake that is constantly made. They think

that the efforts they have previously made, their former merits, so to speak, give them

some kind of rights or advantages, diminish the

demands to be made upon them, and constitute as it were an excuse should they not

work or should they afterwards do something wrong. This, of course, is most

profoundly false. Nothing that a man did yesterday excuses him today. Quite the

reverse, if a man did nothing yesterday, no demands are made upon him today; if he

did anything yesterday, it means that he must do more today. This certainly does not

mean that it is better to do nothing. Whoever does nothing receives nothing.

"As I have said already, one of the first demands is sincerity. But there are different kinds of sincerity. There is clever sincerity and there is stupid sincerity, just as there is clever insincerity and stupid insincerity. Both stupid sincerity and stupid insincerity

are equally mechanical. But if a man wishes to learn to be cleverly sincere, he must be sincere first of all with his teacher and with people who are senior to him in the work.

This will be 'clever sincerity.' But here it is necessary to note that sincerity must not become 'lack of considering.' Lack of considering in relation to the teacher or in

relation to those whom the teacher has appointed, as I have said already, destroys all

possibility of any work. If he wishes to learn to be cleverly insincere he must be insincere about the work and he must learn to be silent when he ought to be silent with

people outside it, who can neither understand nor appreciate it. But sincerity in the

group is an absolute demand, because, if a man continues to lie in the group in the

same way as he lies to himself and to others in life, he will never learn to distinguish

the truth from a lie.

"The second barrier is very often the conquest of fear. A man usually has many

unnecessary, imaginary fears. Lies and fears—this is the atmosphere in which an

ordinary man lives. Just as the conquest of lying is individual, so also is the conquest

of fear. Every man has fears of his own which are peculiar to him alone. These fears

must first be found and then destroyed. The fears of which I speak are usually