In search of the miraculous

about this together with many additions and indications for personal work.

'Each of you,' he said, 'has probably met in life people of one and the same type. Such people often even look like one another, and their inner reactions to things are exactly the same. What one likes the other will like. What one does not like the other will not like. You must remember such occasions because you can study the science of types only by meeting types. There is no other method. Everything else is imagination. You must understand that in the conditions in which you live you cannot meet with more than six or seven types although there are in life a greater number of fundamental types. The rest are all combinations of these fundamental types.'

'How many fundamental types are there in all?' asked someone.

'Some people say twelve,' said G. 'According to the legend the twelve apostles represented the twelve types. Others say more.'

He paused.

'May we know these twelve types, that is, their definitions and characteristics?' asked one of those present.

'I was expecting this question,' said G. 'There has never been an occasion when I have spoken of types when some clever person has not asked this question. How is it you do not understand that if it could be explained it would have been explained long ago. But the whole thing is that types and their differences cannot be defined in ordinary language, and the language in which they could be defined you do not as yet know and will not know for a long time. It is exactly the same as with the 'forty-eight laws.' Someone invariably asks whether he may not know these forty-eight laws. As if it were possible. Understand that you are being given everything that can be given. With the help of what is given to you, you must find the rest. But I know that I am wasting time now in saying this. You still do not understand me and will not understand for a long time yet. Think of the difference between knowledge and being. There are things for the understanding of which a different being is necessary.'

'But if there are no more than seven types around us, why can we not know them, that is, know what is the chief difference between them, and, when meeting them, be able to recognize and distinguish them?' said one of us.

'You must begin with yourself and with the observations of which I have already spoken,' said G., 'otherwise it would be knowledge of which you would be able to make no use. Some of you think you can see types but they are not types at all that you see. In order to see types one must know one's own type and be able to 'depart' from it. In order to know one's own type one must make a good study of one's life, one's whole life from the very beginning; one must know why, and how, things have happened. I want to give you all a task. It will be a general and an individual task at one and the same time. Let every one of you in the group tell about his life. Everything must be told in detail without embellishment, and without suppressing anything. Emphasize the principal and essential things without dwelling on trifles and details. You must be sincere and not be afraid that others will take anything in a wrong way, because everyone is in the same position; everyone must strip himself; everyone must show himself as he is. This task will once more show you why nothing must be taken outside the groups. Nobody would dare to speak if he thought or suspected that what he said in the group would be repeated outside. But he ought to be fully and firmly convinced that nothing will be repeated. And then he will be able to speak without fear with the understanding that others must do the same.'

Soon afterwards G. went to Moscow and in his absence we tried in various ways to carry out the tasks allotted to us. First of all, in order to put G.'s task more easily into practice, some of us, at my suggestion, tried telling the story of our lives not at the general group meeting but in small groups composed of people they knew best.

I am bound to say that all these attempts came to nothing. Some said too much, others said too little. Some went into unnecessary details or into descriptions of what they considered were their particular and original characteristics; others concentrated on their 'sins' and errors. But everything taken together failed to produce what G. evidently expected. The result was anecdotes, or chronological memoirs which 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, well- known 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 feature or chief fault. We shall then see