In Search of the Miraculous

interested nobody, and family recollections which made people yawn. Something was

wrong, but what exactly was wrong even those who had tried to be as sincere as they

could were unable to determine. I remember my own attempts. In the first place I tried

to convey certain early childhood impressions which seemed to me psychologically

interesting because I remembered myself as I was at a very early age and was always

myself astonished by some of these early impressions. But nobody was interested in

this and I quickly saw that this was certainly not what was required of us. I proceeded

further but almost immediately I felt a certainty that there were many things that I had no intention whatever of telling. This was a quite unexpected realization. I had accepted G.'s idea without any opposition and I thought I would be able to tell the

story of my life without any particular difficulty. But in reality it turned out to be quite impossible. Something in me registered such a vehement protest against it that I did

not even attempt to struggle and in speaking of certain periods of my life I tried to

give only the general idea and the significance of the facts which I did not want to

relate. In this connection I noted that my voice and intonations changed when I talked

in this way. This helped me to understand other people. I began to hear that, in

speaking of themselves and their lives, they also spoke in different voices and

different intonations. And there were intonations of a particular kind which I had first

heard in myself and which showed me that people wanted to hide something in what

they were talking about. But intonations gave them away. Observation of intonations

afterwards made it possible for me to understand many other things.

When G. next came to St. Petersburg (he had been in Moscow this time for two or

three weeks) we told him of our attempts; he listened to everything and merely said

that we did not know how to separate "personality" from "essence."

"Personality hides behind essence," he said, "and essence hides behind personality and they mutually screen each other."

"How can essence be separated from personality?" asked one of those present.

"How would you separate your own from what is not your own?" G. replied. "It is necessary to think, it is necessary to know where one or another of your characteristics

has come from. And it is necessary to realize that most people, especially in your

circle of society, have very little of their own. Everything they have is not their own

and is mostly stolen;

everything that they call ideas, convictions, views, conceptions of the world, has all

been pilfered from various sources. And all of it together makes up personality and

must be cast aside."

"But you yourself said that work begins with personality," said someone there.

"Quite true," replied G. "Therefore we must first of all establish of what precisely we are speaking—of what moment in a man's development and of what level of being.

Just now I was simply speaking of a man in life who had no connection whatever with

the work. Such a man, particularly if he belongs to the 'intellectual' classes, is almost entirely composed of personality. In most cases his essence ceases to develop at a very

early age. I know respected fathers of families, professors full of various ideas, wellknown authors, important officials who were almost ministers, whose essence had stopped developing approximately at the age of twelve.

And that is not so bad. It sometimes happens that certain aspects of essence stop at

five or six years of age and then everything ends; all the rest is not their own; it is

repertoire, or taken from books;

or it has been created by imitating ready-made models."

After this there were many conversations, in which G. took part, during which we

tried to find out the reason for our failure to fulfill the task set by G. But the more we talked the less we understood what he actually wanted from us.

"This only shows to what extent you do not know yourselves," said G. "I do not doubt that at least some of you sincerely wished to do what I said, that is, to relate the story of their lives. At the same time they see that they cannot do it and do not even

know how to begin. But remember that sooner or later you will have to go through

this. This is, as it is called, one of the first tests on the way. Without going through

this no one can go further."

"What is it we do not understand?" asked someone.

"You do not understand what it means to be sincere," said G. "You are so used to lying both to yourselves and to others that you can find neither words nor thoughts

when you wish to speak the truth. To tell the complete truth about oneself is very

difficult. But before telling it one must know it. And you do not even know what the

truth about yourselves consists of. Some day I will tell every one of you his chief