In Search of the Miraculous

another instance it happens that in the accumulator there has collected too much

energy which the center cannot manage to use up. Then every, the most ordinary,

impression can be received as double, that is, it may fall at once on the two halves of

the center and produce laughter, that is, the discarding of energy.

"You must understand that I am only giving you an outline. You must remember

that both yawning and laughter are very contagious. This shows that they are

essentially functions of the instinctive and the moving centers."

"Why is laughter so pleasant?" asked someone.

"Because," G. answered, "laughter relieves us of superfluous energy, which, if it remained unused, might become negative, that is, poison. We always have plenty of

this poison in us. Laughter is the antidote. But this antidote is necessary only so long

as we are unable to use all the energy for useful work. It is said of Christ that he never laughed. And indeed you will find in the Gospels no indication or mention of the fact

that at any time Christ laughed. But there are different ways of not laughing. There are people who do not laugh because they are completely immersed in negative

emotions, in malice, in fear, in hatred, in suspicion. And there may be others who do

not laugh because they cannot have negative emotions. Understand one thing. In the

higher centers there can be no laughter, because in higher centers there is no division,

and no 'yes' and 'no.'"

Chapter Twelve

BY THAT time, midsummer 1916, work in our groups began to take new and more

intensive forms. G. spent most of the time in St. Petersburg, only going to Moscow for

a few days and coming back again generally with two or three of his Moscow pupils.

Our lectures and meetings had by that time already lost their formal character;

we had all begun to know one another better and, though there was a little friction, we

represented on the whole a very compact group united by interest in the new ideas we

were learning and the new possibilities of knowledge and self-knowledge which had

been opened out before us. At that time there were about thirty of us. We met almost

every evening. Several times, on arriving from Moscow, G. arranged excursions into

the country for large parties, and picnics where we had shashlik, which were somehow totally out of keeping with St. Petersburg. There remains in my memory a trip to

Ostrovki up the river Neva, more particularly because I suddenly realized on this trip

why G. arranged these seemingly quite aimless amusements. I realized that he was all

the time observing and that many of us on these occasions showed entirely new

aspects of ourselves which had remained well hidden at the formal meetings in St.

Petersburg.

My meetings with G.'s Moscow pupils were at that time quite unlike my first

meeting with them in the spring of the preceding year. They did not appear to me now

to be either artificial or to be playing a role which had been learned by heart. On the

contrary, I always eagerly awaited their coming and tried to find out from them what

their work consisted of in Moscow and what G. had said to them that we did not

know. And I found out from them a great deal which came in very useful to me later

in my work. In my new talks with them I saw the development of a very definite plan.

We were not only learning from G. but we had also to learn one from another. I was

beginning to see G.'s groups as a "school" of some medieval painter whose pupils lived with him and worked with him and, while learning from him, taught one another.

At the same time I understood why G.'s Moscow pupils could not answer my

questions at our first meeting. I realized how utterly naive my questions had been: "On what is based their work on themselves?" "What

constitutes the system which they study?" "What is the origin of this system?" And so on.

I understood now that these questions could not be answered. One must learn in

order to begin to understand this. And at that time, a little over a year ago, I had

thought I had the right to ask such questions just as the new people who now came to

us began with precisely the same kind of questions and were surprised we did not

answer them, and, as we were already able to see, regarded us as artificial or as

playing a part which we had learned.

But new people appeared only at large meetings at which G. took part. Meetings of

the original group were at that time held separately. And it was quite clear why this

should have been so. We were already beginning to get free from the self-confidence

and the knowing of everything with which people approach the work and we could

already understand G. better than before.

But at general meetings it was extraordinarily interesting for us to hear how new

people asked the same questions we used to ask in the beginning and how they did not

understand the same elementary, simple things that we had been unable to understand.

These meetings with new people gave us a certain amount of self-satisfaction.