In search of the miraculous Read online

  In search of the miraculous

  Ouspensky

  P. D. OUSPENSKY

  IN SEARCH OF THE MIRACULOUS

  FRAGMENTS OF AN UNKNOWN TEACHING

  Chapter One

  I RETURNED to Russia in November, 1914, that is, at the beginning of the first world war, after a rather long journey through Egypt, Ceylon, and India. The war had found me in Colombo and from there I went back through England.

  When leaving Petersburg at the start of my journey I had said that I was going to "seek the miraculous." The "miraculous" is very difficult to define. But for me this word had a quite definite meaning. I had come to the conclusion a long time ago that there was no escape from the labyrinth of contradictions in which we live except by an entirely new road, unlike anything hitherto known or used by us. But where this new or forgotten road began I was unable to say. I already knew then as an undoubted fact that beyond the thin film of false reality there existed another reality from which, for some reason, something separated us. The "miraculous" was a penetration into this unknown reality. And it seemed to me that the way to the unknown could be found in the East. Why in the East? It was difficult to answer this. In this idea there was, perhaps, something of romance, but it may have been the absolutely real conviction that, in any case, nothing could be found in Europe.

  On the return journey, and during the several weeks I spent in London, everything I had thought about the results of my search was thrown into confusion by the wild absurdity of the war and by all the emotions which filled the air, conversation, and newspapers, and which, against my will, often affected me.

  But when I returned to Russia, and again experienced all those thoughts with which I had gone away, I felt that my search, and everything connected with it, was more important than anything that was happening or could happen in a world of "obvious absurdities."1 I said to myself

  1That refers to a little book I had as a child. The hook was called Obvious Absurdities, it belonged to Stupin's "Little Library" and consisted of such pictures as, for instance, a man carrying a house on his back, a carriage with square wheels, and similar things. This book impressed me very much at that time, because there were many pictures in it about which I could not understand what was absurd in them. They looked exactly like ordinary things in life. And later I began to think that the book really gave pictures of real life, because when I continued to grow I became more and more convinced that all life consisted of "obvious absurdities." Later experiences only strengthened this conviction.

  then that the war must be looked upon as one of those generally catastrophic conditions of life in the midst of which we have to live and work, and seek answers to our questions and doubts. The war, the great European war, in the possibility of which I had not wanted to believe and the reality of which I did not for a long time wish to acknowledge, had become a fact. We were in it and I saw that it must be taken as a great memento mori showing that hurry was necessary and that it was impossible to believe in "life" which led nowhere.

  The war could not touch me personally, at any rate not until the final catastrophe which seemed to me inevitable for Russia, and perhaps for the whole of Europe, but not yet imminent. Though then, of course, the approaching catastrophe looked only temporary and no one had as yet conceived all the disintegration and destruction, both inner and outer, in which we should have to live in the future.

  Summing up the total of my impressions of the East and particularly of India, I had to admit that, on my return, my problem seemed even more difficult and complicated than on my departure. India and the East had not only not lost their glamour of the miraculous; on the contrary, this glamour had acquired new shades that were absent from it before. I saw clearly that something could be found there which had long since ceased to exist in Europe and I considered that the direction I had taken was the right one. But, at the same time, I was convinced that the secret was better and more deeply hidden than I could previously have supposed.

  When I went away I already knew I was going to look for a school or schools. I had arrived at this long ago. I realized that personal, individual efforts were insufficient and that it was necessary to come into touch with the real and living thought which must be in existence somewhere but with which we had lost contact.

  This I understood; but the idea of schools itself changed very much during my travels and in one way became simpler and more concrete and in another way became more cold and distant. I want to say that schools lost much of their fairy-tale character.

  On my departure I still admitted much that was fantastic in relation to schools. "Admitted" is perhaps too strong a word. I should say better that I dreamed about the possibility of a non-physical contact with schools, a contact, so to speak, "on another plane." I could not explain it clearly, but it seemed to me that even the beginning of contact with a school may have a miraculous nature. 1 imagined, for example, the possibility of making contact with schools of the distant past, with schools of Pythagoras, with schools of Egypt, with the schools of those who built Notre-Dame, and so on. It seemed to me that the barriers of time and space should disappear on making such contact. The idea of schools in itself was fantastic and nothing seemed to me too fantastic in relation to this idea. And I saw no contradiction between these ideas and my attempts to find schools in India. It seemed to me that it was precisely in India that it would be possible to establish some kind of contact which would afterwards become permanent and independent of any outside interferences.

  On the return voyage, after a whole series of meetings and impressions, the idea of schools became much more real and tangible and lost its fantastic character. This probably took place chiefly because, as I then realized, "school" required not only a search but "selection," or choice— I mean on our side.

  That schools existed I did not doubt. But at the same time I became convinced that the schools I heard about and with which I could have come into contact were not for me. They were schools of either a frankly religious nature or of a half-religious character, but definitely devotional in tone. These schools did not attract me, chiefly because if I had been seeking a religious way I could have found it in Russia. Other schools were of a slightly sentimental moral-philosophical type with a shade of asceticism, like the schools of the disciples or followers of Ramakrishna; 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 men­tioned 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 fascinate them and which they follow from street to street and at the end arrive at the house of a certain Oriental to whom the eyes belong. Or people who, in the presence of the same Oriental, suddenly feel he is looking right through them, seeing all their feelings, thoughts, and desires; and they have a strange sensation in their legs and cannot move, and then fall into his power to such an extent that he can make them do everything he desires, even from a distance. All this and many other stories of the same sort had always seemed to me to be simply bad fiction. People invent miracles for themselves and invent exactly what is expected from them. It is a mixture of superstition, self-suggestion, and defective thinking, and, according to my observation, these stories never appear without a certain collaboration on the part of the men to whom they refer.

  So that, in the light of previous experience, it was only after the persistent efforts of one of my new acquaintances, M., that I agreed to meet G. and have a talk with him.

  My first meeting with him entirely changed my opinion of him and of what I might expect from him.

  I remember this meeting very well. We arrived at a small cafe in a noisy though not central street. I saw a man of an oriental type, no longer young, with a black mustache and piercing eyes, who astonished me first of all because he seemed to be disguised and completely out of keeping with the place and its atmosphere. I was still full of impressions of the East. And this man with the face of an Indian raja or an Arab sheik whom I at once seemed to see in a white burnoose or a gilded turban, seated here in this little cafe, where small dealers and commission agents met together, in a black overcoat with a velvet collar and a black bowler hat, produced the strange, unexpected, and almost alarming impression of a man poorly disguised, the sight of whom embarrasses you because you see he is not what he pretends to be and yet you have to speak and behave as though you did not see it He spoke Russian incorrectly with a strong Caucasian accent; and this accent, with which we are accustomed to associate anything apart from philosophical ideas, strengthened still further the strangeness and the unexpectedness of this impression.

  I do not remember how our talk began; I think we spoke of India, of esotericism, and of yogi schools. I gathered that G. had traveled widely and had been in places of which I had only heard and which I very much wished to visit. Not only did my questions not embarrass him but it seemed to me that he put much more into each answer than I had asked for. I liked his manner of speaking, which was careful and precise. M. soon left us. G. told me of his work in Moscow. I did not fully understand him. It transpired from what he said that in his work, which was chiefly psychological in character, chemistry played a big part. Listening to him for the first time I, of course, took his words literally.

  "What you say," I said, "reminds me of something I heard about a school in southern India. A Brahmin, an exceptional man in many respects, told a young Englishman in Travancore of a school which studied the chemistry of the human body, and by means of introducing or removing various substances, could change a man's moral and psychological nature. This is very much like what you are saying."

  "It may be so," said G., "but, at the same time, it may be quite different. There are schools which appear to make use of similar methods but understand them quite differently. A similarity of methods or even of ideas proves nothing."

  "There is another question that interests me very much," I said. "There are substances which yogis take to induce certain states. Might these not be, in certain cases, narcotics? I have myself carried out a number of experiments in this direction and everything I have read about magic proves to me quite clearly that all schools at all times and in all countries have made a very wide use of narcotics for the creation of those states which make 'magic' possible."

  "Yes," said G. "In many cases these substances are those which you call 'narcotics' But they can be used in entirely different ways. There are schools which make use of narcotics in the right way. People in these schools take them for self-study; in order to take a look ahead, to know their possibilities better, to see beforehand, 'in advance,' what can be attained later on as the result of prolonged work. When a man sees this and is convinced that what he has learned theoretically really exists, he then works consciously, he knows where he is going. Sometimes this is the easiest way of being convinced of the real existence of those possibilities which man often suspects in himself. There is a special chemistry relating to this. There are particular substances for each function. Each function can either be strengthened or weakened, awakened or put to sleep. But to do this a great knowledge of the human machine and of this special chemistry is necessary. In all those schools which make use of this method experiments are carried out only when they are really necessary and only under the di
rection of experienced and competent men who can foresee all results and adopt measures against possible undesirable consequences. The substances used in these schools are not merely 'narcotics' as you call them, although many of them are prepared from such drugs as opium, hashish, and so on. Besides schools in which such experiments are carried out, there are other schools which use these or similar substances, not for experiment or study but to attain definite desired results, if only for a short time. Through a skillful use of such substances a man can be made very clever or very strong, for a certain time. Afterwards, of course, he dies or goes mad, but this is not taken into consideration. Such schools also exist. So you see that we must speak very cautiously about schools. They may do practically the same things but the results will be totally different."

  I was deeply interested in everything G. said. I felt in it some new points of view, unlike any I had met with before.

  He invited me to go with him to a house where some of his pupils were to forgather.

  We took a carriage and went in the direction of Sokolniki.

  On the way G. told me how the war had interfered with many of his plans; many of his pupils had gone with the first mobilization; very expensive apparatus and instruments ordered from abroad had been lost. Then he spoke of the heavy expenditure connected with his work, of the expensive apartments he had taken, and to which, I gathered, we were going. He said, further, that his work interested a number of well-known people in Moscow—"professors" and "artists," as he expressed it. But when I asked him who, precisely, they were, he did not give me a single name.

  "I ask," I said, "because I am a native of Moscow; and, besides, I have worked on newspapers here for ten years so that I know more or less everybody."

  G. said nothing to this.

  We came to a large empty flat over a municipal school, evidently be­longing to teachers of this school. I think it was in the place of the former Red Pond.