In search of the miraculous

of the large accumulator faster than it pours in, then there comes a moment when the large accumulator is drained of all energy and the organism dies. But this happens very seldom. Usually the organism automatically stops working long before this. Special conditions are necessary to cause the organism to die exhausted of all its energy. In ordinary conditions a man will fall asleep or he will faint or he will develop some internal complication which will stop the work a long time before the real danger.

'One need not, therefore, be afraid of efforts; the danger of dying from them is not at all great. It is much easier to die from inaction, from laziness, and from the fear of making efforts.

'Our aim, on the contrary, is to learn to connect the necessary center with the large accumulator. So long as we are unable to do this, all our work will be wasted because we shall fall asleep before our efforts can give any kind of results.

'Small accumulators suffice for the ordinary, everyday work of life. But for work on oneself, for inner growth, and for the efforts which are required of a man who enters the way, the energy from these small accumulators is not enough.

'We must learn how to draw energy straight from the large accumulator.

'This however is possible only with the help of the emotional center. It is essential that this be understood. The connection with the large accumulator can be effected only through the emotional center. The instinctive, moving, and intellectual centers, by themselves, can feed only on the small accumulators.

'This is precisely what people do not understand. Therefore their aim must be the development of the activity of the emotional center. The emotional center is an apparatus much more subtle than the intellectual center, particularly if we take into consideration the fact that in the whole of the intellectual center the only part that works is the formatory apparatus and that many things are quite inaccessible to the intellectual center. If anyone desires to know and to understand more than he actually knows and understands, he must remember that this new knowledge and this new understanding will come through the emotional center and not through the intellectual center.'

In addition to what he had said about accumulators G. made some very interesting remarks about yawning and about laughter.

'There are two incomprehensible functions of our organism inexplicable from the scientific point of view,' he said, 'although naturally science does not admit them to be inexplicable; these are yawning and laughter. Neither the one nor the other can be rightly understood and

explained without knowing about accumulators and their role in the organism.

'You have noticed that you yawn when you are tired. This is especially noticeable, for instance, in the mountains, when a man who is unaccustomed to them yawns almost continually while he is ascending a mountain. Yawning is the pumping of energy into the small accumulators. When they empty too quickly, that is, when one of them has no time to fill up while the other is being emptied, yawning becomes almost continuous. There are certain diseased conditions which can cause stoppage of the heart when a man wishes but is not able to yawn, and other conditions are known when something goes wrong with the pump, causing it to work without effect, when a man yawns the whole time, but does not pump in any energy.

'The study and the observation of yawning from this point of view may reveal much that is new and interesting.

'Laughter is also directly connected with accumulators. But laughter is the opposite function to yawning. It is not pumping in, but pumping out, that is, the pumping out and the discarding of superfluous energy collected in the accumulators. Laughter does not exist in all centers, but only in centers divided into two halves—positive and negative. If I have not yet spoken of this in detail, I shall do so when we come to a more detailed study of the centers. At present we shall take only the intellectual center. There can be impressions which fall at once on two halves of the center and produce at once a sharp 'yes' and 'no.' Such a simultaneous 'yes' and 'no' produces a kind of convulsion in the center and, being unable to harmonize and digest these two opposite impressions of one fact, the center begins to throw out in the form of laughter the energy which flows into it from the accumulator whose turn it is to supply it. In 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-