In Search of the Miraculous

I am not attempting to describe everything that took place in Essentuki; a whole

book would have to be written in order to do this. G. led us at a fast pace without

losing a single minute. He explained many things during our walks, while music was

being played in the Essentuki park, and in the midst of housework.

In general, during the short period of our stay at Essentuki, G. unfolded to us the

plan of the whole work. We saw the beginnings of all the methods, the beginnings of

all the ideas, their links, their connections and direction. Many things remained

obscure for us; many things we did not rightly understand, quite the contrary; but in

any case we were given some general propositions by which I thought we could be

guided later on.

All the ideas we had come to know up to that time brought us face to face with a

whole series of questions connected with the practical realization of work on oneself,

and, naturally, they evoked many discussions among the members of our group.

G. always took part in these discussions and explained different aspects of the

organization of schools.

"Schools are imperative," he once said, "first of all because of the complexity of man's organization. A man is unable to keep watch on the whole of himself, that is, all his different sides. Only school can do this, school methods, school discipline—a man

is much too lazy, he will do a great deal without the proper intensity, or he will do

nothing at all while thinking that he is doing something; he will work with intensity on

something that does not need intensity and will let those moments pass by when

intensity is imperative. Then he spares himself; he is afraid of doing anything

unpleasant. He will never attain the necessary intensity by himself. If you have

observed yourselves in a proper way you will agree with this. If a man sets himself a

task of some sort he very quickly begins to be indulgent with himself. He tries to

accomplish his task in the easiest way possible and so on. This is not work. In work

only super-efforts are counted, that is, beyond the normal, beyond the necessary; ordinary efforts are not counted."

"What is meant by a super-effort?" someone asked.

"It means an effort beyond the effort that is necessary to achieve a given purpose,"

said G. "Imagine that I have been walking all day and am very tired. The weather is

bad, it is raining and cold. In the evening I arrive home. I have walked, perhaps,

twenty-five miles. In the house there is supper; it is warm and pleasant. But, instead of sitting down to supper, I go out into the rain again and decide to walk another two

miles along the road and then return home. This would be a super-effort. While I was

going home it was simply an effort and this does not count. I was on my way home,

the cold, hunger, the rain—all this made me walk. In the other case I walk because I

myself decide to do so. This kind of super-effort becomes still more difficult when I

do not decide upon it myself but obey a teacher who at an unexpected moment

requires from me to make fresh efforts when I have decided that efforts for the day are

over.

"Another form of super-effort is carrying out any kind of work at a faster rate than is called for by the nature of this work. You are doing something—well, let us say,

you are washing up or chopping wood. You have an hour's work. Do it in half an

hour—this will be a super-effort.

"But in actual practice a man can never bring himself to make super-efforts

consecutively or for a long time; to do this another person's will is necessary which

would have no pity and which would have method.

"If a man were able to work on himself everything would be very simple and

schools would be unnecessary. But he cannot, and the reasons for this lie very deep in

his nature. I will leave for the moment his insincerity with himself, the perpetual lies

he tells himself, and so on, and take only the division of the centers. This alone makes

independent work on himself impossible for a man. You must understand that the

three principal centers, the thinking, the emotional, and the moving, are con-

nected together and, In a normal man, they are always working in unison. This unison

is what presents the chief difficulty in work on oneself. What is meant by this unison?

It means that a definite work of the thinking center is connected with a definite work

of the emotional and moving centers—that is to say, that a certain kind of thought is

inevitably connected with a certain kind of emotion (or mental state) and with a certain kind of movement (or posture); and one evokes the other, that is, a certain kind of emotion (or mental state) evokes certain movements or postures and certain thoughts,

and a certain kind of movement or posture evokes certain emotions or mental states,

and so forth. Everything is connected and one thing cannot exist without another

thing.