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A. Because identification makes thought narrow and defective, it binds you, you cannot think, you cannot make deductions. It lowers the standard of man's normal intellectual capacity. As to why thinking about the big ideas of the system stops identification, it is because you cannot think about them if you identify with them. Your thinking will produce no effect. When we are studying, trying to understand, this means a new way of thinking. The moment we go back to the old way of thinking, we identify. Q. You said formatory thinking always concerns itself with opposites; but how can we know anything other than by opposites? A. Not always—I said it is one of the characteristics of formatory thinking. And when we think, we must think about the subject itself, not about its opposite. Q. But if I am to know about some particular thing, I must know what it is not. A. Not at all. You can know what one or another thing is without making a catalogue of what it is not. It is quite a wrong self-accusation to say that you have to use such a clumsy method of thinking, because in that way you would have to think for two years about every small thing. You can think about things without opposites—just about what they are. Formatory thinking is not thinking. Never forget that formatory thinking can serve many useful purposes, but it is not for thinking. Q. People No. 1 live all their lives with formatory apparatus. Does that mean they have no growth of being at all from the beginning of their lives? A. Not only men No. 1 but also No. 2 and No. 3 can live only with formatory apparatus. The great majority of people use nothing else. Certainly they have a certain growth of being; only it is, so to speak, not individual, it is mass growth, in the sense of a child and a grown up man. But their being does not grow beyond a certain level, and we are interested in growth of being towards man No. 4. To grow up in the ordinary way is natural; but this does not change the level of being. And even this natural growth of being can be arrested. Q. I have noticed that if I ask a question, while it is being answered, my mind is working and, as a result, I am not listening. What is this due to? A. Quite right. This is simply associative thinking, mechanical thinking. Naturally, if you ask a question and want to know the answer you must stop associations and take in what is said, and only then think about it and compare. If you do not stop associations, the answer comes to you mixed with your own thoughts, not exactly what was said. So you never get the right answer. Struggle with associative thinking is a definite line of work. If you study something, listen to something or are trying to understand something, you have to do it with a free mind. If you go on with your own thoughts at the same time, your mind will never be free to follow.
Q. Why is one inclined to ask 'why' rather than 'how'? A. Because it is easier, more mechanical, we are more accustomed to it. To ask 'how' needs thinking; you have to formulate your question in the right way. And 'why' can be asked without thinking. Q. It was said that one of the methods of struggling with negative emotions is thinking differently. I do not quite understand what thinking differently means. A. It means to take some subject which produces emotion and think about it, trying not to justify yourself or to accuse other people. That will be different thinking. Although there are negative emotions that cannot be destroyed in this way, for they need stronger methods, this method must be tried first in every case. Q. I find that most of the time trivial thoughts occupy my mind. Would it be a good plan to study some difficult language, Russian for example, about which one could think while doing purely mechanical work? A. For what purpose? After some time you will have wrong thoughts in Russian! Q. Is there any way in which we can remember more clearly what we have understood when we were in a better state? A. It is a very important thing, but I do not know of any special method. These moments must be connected. Look backwards, try to compare. This is particularly important in relation to some definite question. For instance, you may understand something you had not understood half an hour ago; but perhaps in the past there have been moments when you also understood something in this connection. Try to remember these moments and connect them. Q. Does understanding of an idea or a term vary in relation to the degree of being? A. Certainly. People understand according to their level, their capacity— not according to the meaning of things. Q. My difficulty is that no idea is completely clear to me. A. It is impossible to make it clear with formatory thinking and words. People think they understand a thing when they give it a name, but they do not realize that this is artificial. When you can feel a thing and when you can verify it by higher consciousness and higher mind, then only can you say that it is really true and that it really exists. And schools do not deal with ordinary intellectual ideas. This means that these ideas, as for instance, the idea of self-remembering, are not clear without higher centres, for without higher centres one cannot come to the truth. Schools are the work of higher centres; they give us something which we cannot attain by ourselves, because we can only use the ordinary mind. And the ordinary mind has definite limits and cannot jump over them. It can accumulate material, forget it, accumulate again and forget again, and reduce the system to just nonsense by going too straight in one direction.
When you find yourself in a state approaching higher emotional centre, you will be astounded how much you can understand at once—and then you come back to your normal state and you forget it all. By persistent self-remembering and by certain other methods you may come to the higher emotional centre, but you will not be able to retain what you have understood then. If you write it down, it will have no sense when you read it with the intellectual centre later. Q. Sometimes when I have tried to self-remember I have a strange feeling about inanimate objects, as if they had a sort of awareness that was them. A. Discount the possibility of imagination. Let us say simply that you feel something new in things. But when you begin to explain it, you begin to imagine. Do not try to explain, just leave it. Sometimes you can feel strange things in that way, but explanations are always wrong, because you feel with one very good apparatus and explain with another, a very clumsy machine that cannot really explain. Q, It all seems to come back to the same question—how to be more emotional. A. You cannot try to be emotional—the more you try, the less emotional you will be. You can try to be conscious, and if you become more conscious, you will become more emotional. You must think about how to get more energy to be conscious. That would be a right question, and the answer would be that first you must stop leaks and try to get more energy by following all the indications you get from the work—all of them. Do not only concentrate on one; you can always find something that you did not do. Q. Sometimes I feel that I have the capacity to concentrate, but I do not know what to do. I only think about small things and it disappears again. A. You have always more than enough material for work on yourself; you can never be at a loss as to what to do. Try to stop thoughts—that is easy and useful. If you have no energy to do that, you must accumulate energy by struggle with mechanical habits and things like that. That will accumulate enough energy for this effort to remember yourself or the effort to stop thoughts. Q. Is meditation, as advocated in Indian books, the same as self-remembering? A. They speak of meditation but they also say that one must work under a teacher. We read and remember one thing and forget another; we think we can study meditation or meditate ourselves. If you can remember yourself, you can meditate; if not, you cannot. Self-remembering means control of thoughts, a different state. Meditation is an action of a developed mind, and we ascribe it to ourselves. It would be very good if we could meditate, but we cannot; self-remembering is the way to it. You cannot begin from the end; you have to begin from the beginning
like in everything else. What does 'meditation' mean for us? Thinking about the system; trying to connect ideas and reconstruct the system. This is 'meditation', not simply thinking about one word or one idea. Q. In trying to think about some definite idea of the system I always think the same thing I thought before. I cannot help it. A. This is a technical side. You must try different ways. You can either concentrate on one or another side of the subject, or take one or another point of view, or try to explain to someone else. If it is difficult to think on some definite subject, you can always imagine that you are explaining this subject to some person. But again, you must imagine yourself explaining it to different people—people with preparation or without preparation, a religious person, a scientifically minded person and so on. You have to explain differently according to who you are explaining to. Then it is always very useful to separate what you knew before from what you have learnt from the system. This is very important. If you do not separate, you will always mix things in your thinking. It is necessary to know what you knew before, what you read somewhere and what you got here. There is yet another thing you can do—you can try to write a programme of thinking for yourself. Find your own subjects you would like to think about, or subjects which you think may be useful to you, or subjects which you do not understand but would like to learn to think about. All this is useful. Then, if you have time, think about them two or three times a day. Q. I have tried these imaginary conversations you suggested, but have not been able to make them last long enough. A. These imaginary conversations must go according to plan; you cannot start them just from any point. You can invent some sort of situation and make yourself speak to some imaginary person, or to someone you know, and explain some particular subject to him according to the kind of person he is. This may help. But do not try to give a lecture—a lecture is bound to turn formatory. Q. My difficulty is talking within my mind. Will these imaginary conversations help me to work against this habit? A. Yes, that may be useful, or you can think about the ideas of the system, set yourself definite tasks. Another approach is to see whether this mental talking is useful or useless. It may be useful, but mostly it is useless. Like all mechanical habits it is very difficult to struggle with. You do not notice it, or you may have been talking to yourself for two hours before you notice, so you must have a better watchman to ring the bell when you begin. This means being more awake. Q. I feel one might achieve something if one could remember more of the system at one moment instead of just fragments. A. Quite right. That is why you will see after some time that it is useful
to work with new people and explain things to them, because you cannot have a sufficiently large part of the system before your eyes if you do not repeat it all, and you can only do this when you have to explain things to new people and answer their questions. It is not necessary to give lectures or have large groups; something useful can be done with one, two or three people. Q. Lately I have been more dissatisfied than usual with myself and the lack of results obtained from my efforts. What is to be done? A. You must not let yourself identify with these negative feelings and disappointments; it is the worst possible thing. Think about something cheerful. For instance, you can take any subject in the system and compare how you thought before about it and how you think now. You will see that you have gained one thing, and another thing, and a third thing. That will help you to struggle on. Q. In the example of the eye of a needle in the Gospels does it mean that when identification ceases a person has a chance? A. It may be simply wrong valuation; or it may be too many words, a great load of words, so that a man cannot pass through. Q. In our present state, can we know real love, loyalty or devotion? A. For us, these things are relative. We can have them more or less. But we cannot know them in any absolute way. Q. I find it difficult to understand that faith has no place in this system. Surely it is necessary to believe that the system has possibilities of making you more conscious? A. That will not help—quite the reverse. You must try to verify it, and base your attitude on facts, not on belief. If you do even one-tenth of what is suggested, very soon you will have facts, and then you must base your attitude on these facts, not on theories. Faith is a passive thing. We have to verify everything, accept nothing on faith. For faith there are other ways, but in the Fourth Way faith would be weakness—trying to escape work. Instead of trying to know, we would believe. Only what man himself finds to be true can serve as a sufficient foundation. We must understand that faith, in the true sense, is a certain state that is more than emotional. It is a positive emotion and, taken in this sense, it means a higher level which we, being men 1, 2 and 3, have not reached, and so we do not know what faith means—it is only a word for us. Faith must be directed to big things, not applied to small things of ordinary life. When people use what we call 'faith' in cases when they must know— it is just laziness. There can be one faith and another faith—it can be on different levels. According to the division of men into seven categories there can be seven kinds of faith, so it is difficult to speak in these terms. Q. Why should I want to make myself different if I do not believe there is a reason?
A. Not believe, but know. If you merely believe, you will do nothing. If you find out your state, you will try to get out. But this will be based on facts, on observations, not on belief. Q. What centre is used for faith? A. Real faith is a higher emotion, belonging to the higher emotional centre. In our ordinary emotional centre there can only be imitation faith. Real faith means not only emotion, but also knowledge. Q. I had an idea that work on oneself was work towards salvation, towards immortality. A. Big words. But if you said it is towards not making fools of ourselves, I would understand you. We constantly make fools of ourselves because we are asleep. Q. Isn't there a part of ourselves which survives bodily death? A, This is a very interesting and very important point. You ask so simply about after death, as though one could know about it. All experience of all mankind (I do not mean imagination) shows; hat we cannot know what happens after death, otherwise we would have known something positive about it. Since we know nothing, it proves definitely that in this state of consciousness, with ordinary centres, we cannot get at the truth, we can only make theories. First try to understand that our capacity of cognition, our capacity of knowing, is limited by our state of consciousness. In this state of consciousness we can only know certain things and have answers only to certain questions. If we want to know more, we find that we cannot; in practically every line of study we come sooner or later to a dead wall. In some cases this wall remains in exactly the same place, as in the case of life after death—we know no more about it than man of the Stone Age. We can only think that if we acquire a higher state of consciousness and use higher centres we may get a concrete answer to that question. We can know our life only from birth to death. If we want to know what was before and what will be after—if there is a before and after in relation to that—we can only hope that in a better state of consciousness, using an improved machine, we will be able to understand. We ask ourselves these questions and we do not realize that we cannot have an answer such as we are. There are many questions like that. It is necessary to realize and remember how many are the things we come up against in our thinking which are really insoluble for our mind. When we realize that, it will help us to see that we must begin with possible problems. Many people, I do not mean necessarily in the work, but even in the work, many people spend all their mental energy on these insoluble problems. They invent all kinds of solutions, try to think in this or that way about them, but it is all quite useless. You can understand one thing if you understand another thing, and a third thing if you have understood the first two. There are ways for everything, but some problems we can approach with the ordinary mind, while other problems
we must put off and wait till we are more conscious and are able to use better machines for thinking. In ordinary thinking, in ordinary philosophy and psychology, this question never arises, or if it does, it arises in so vague and confused a form that it docs not help. But we know more divisions, more steps, and we must use this knowledge. It will help us to think more practically and to avoid useless abstractions and trying to solve problems which at present we cannot solve.
CHAPTER XV Idea of esotericism—The logical method and the psychological method of thinking—Explanation of the psychological method—What the idea of esotericism implies—Certain kinds of esoteric ideas become accessible only at difficult periods—Necessity of being united— Materiality of knowledge —Great knowledge and how it differs from ordinary knowledge— Accumulators of knowledge—Schools—Can one affect external events?— Study of life—Big events of life and their influence—Subjective ways and objective way—Attitudes as a means of changing influences—Assessing events in life—Gradual disappearance of B influences—The reason for the decrease of influence of esoteric circles—Lack of preparation—The system and how it is taught—Different scales—Death of schools, and conditions necessary for their existence—Relation of the system to Christianity— To die and to be born—Prayer—Suggestions concerning the study of the Lord's Prayer. I HAVE GIVEN YOU A GENERAL IDEA of the fundamental principles of the system and up to now the centre of gravity of our work—at least of practical work—was in ourselves. To-day I want to show you a larger view. It is necessary to understand the idea of esotericism and to realize why certain people can understand this idea while other people cannot. We must know what esotericism means, what is included in it, what is excluded by it, what is connected with it, and what can serve as a kind of test or touch-stone for recognizing people who can understand it. For some people the idea of esotericism appears absurd, impossible. For them esotericism not only does not seem valuable but does not even appear as possible truth. But for others the idea of esotericism is necessary and important. The cause of this is to be found in the difference of method. All ways of thinking can be divided into two categories: logical thinking and psychological thinking, and the capacity or incapacity to use the psychological method of thinking makes an enormous difference. The logical method is better than no method, but it is very limited. It is useful in law courts, but for understanding it is not sufficient. For logical thinking esotericism is impossible, because it cannot be demonstrated or formulated, but for psychological thinking, which sees the psychological nature of things, the idea of esotericism follows from many facts we can
observe. So the psychological method may bring one to the idea of esotericism and may lead to proofs of its existence—certainly subjective proofs, but still proofs. And this in its turn may bring a man to the realization of the necessity of systems or teachings of an esoteric origin. It gives him the possibility of understanding the ideas of such systems and leads to the realization of the necessity of three lines of work and to an understanding of them. First we must try to understand the difference between the logical and the psychological methods, and to establish what each of them is. The psychological method cannot be denned; but we can find examples of its application, of its working. We can see how the psychological method opens new ways of thinking, how by using it we begin to understand many things. When, by means of the psychological method, we have made a general survey of the teachings which prove to have an esoteric origin, we shall more or less know the qualities of teachings which can be called esoteric and shall be able to think in a right way about this system and apply its principles in practice. The psychological method starts with two admissions. The first is that things have their inner meaning. The second is that things are connected; that they only appear to be separated. Things depend on one another; they stand in a certain relation to one another, whereas the logical method takes each thing separately. So, the psychological method studies everything first from the point of view of its inner meaning and, secondly, it finds similarities in the dissimilar. The basis of this method, and the chief difference from ordinary methods, is the realization of the relativity of mind—the understanding of the type and kind of mind used and realization that in one state of mind things can be understood in one way and in another in another way. For the logical mind everything is certain and unique. But the psychological method shows that every thing, every conclusion, every deduction is a mental picture and is merely the result of the working of our mind. For distinguishing, comparing and finding the relative values of things and seeing which is higher and which lower, you can start only with this realization of the possibility of different minds. When you compare ideas, let us say certain ideas of the New Testament, of the Upanishads, or some attributed to Pythagoras or Plato with scientific ideas or philosophy, sometimes you can experience this realization of minds on different levels. What I want you to understand is that, even using ordinary knowledge, you can come to the relative value of ideas and see that the starting-point is the realization that our ordinary mind is not the only one that exists. See if you can find some examples of the psychological method; if you cannot do so now, you must try to find, later, examples of cases when you had new possibilities of understanding.
Q. Do you mean that one is not guided by the external similarity of facts? A. This is one aspect. If you meet with it, you will know what is psychological method and what is not. Q. Is the psychological method the use of the intellectual part of the intellectual centre? A. No, not quite. The more centres and the more parts of centres you use, the better the psychological method. It means using all the powers you have. Logical method means the use of only the mechanical part of intellectual centre. Q. And is the esoteric method the use of higher centres? A. No, it is the use of the system. You cannot use higher centres, but you can use the system. Q. Is psychological thinking only possible when all our functions are working rightly? A. We must start as we are. We cannot wait till we change, because if we do we will never change; and if we change mechanically, we change only for the worse. Q. What are the first things to learn in trying to think psychologically? I feel it is more than I can accomplish. A. When you say it is more than you can accomplish you think about the completed process. And I speak about the process itself, about beginning to work. If you say this is beyond you, you can do nothing and so, naturally, nothing happens. It is again this habit of thinking in absolutes. Q. What are the essential features of esotericism? A. It is difficult to speak about essential features, because it depends on how you take this word. The word 'esoteric' means inner. Esotericism includes in itself the idea of the existence of an inner circle of humanity. You remember how humanity was described as consisting of four circles —esoteric, mesoteric and exoteric, which constitute the inner circle, and the outer circle in which we live. The idea of esotericism implies transmission of knowledge; it presumes the existence of a group of people to whom a certain knowledge belongs. This must not be understood in some mystical way, but more definitely, concretely. There are a great many differences between the inner and the outer circles. For instance, many things we want to find or create can exist only in the inner circle, such things as positive emotions, understanding between people, certain kinds of knowledge; all this belongs to the inner circle. I think this is sufficient for understanding the idea of the inner or esoteric circle. Q. I understand that the primary feature of esoteric knowledge is that it is hidden and one would not be likely to find it. So how can we recognize esoteric knowledge or an esoteric school? A. We are studying a system which is supposed to be esoteric, so with its help we will be able to recognize it. And although esoteric knowledge is hidden from ordinary life, it can be found. It is not hidden absolutely,
so that nobody can find it, otherwise it would have no meaning. This would be contrary to its aims and would spoil the results of its existence. The only meaning of hidden knowledge is that it can be found; the important thing is how to recognize it. With the help of these ideas, comparing what can be found in the ordinary intellectual way and what cannot and then comparing it with the system, we shall be able to establish with a certain degree of probability the level of the knowledge we meet with. If we take history in the ordinary way as a series of separate events, we shall not find proofs of esotericism. One thing will follow another, on the surface and without apparent connection. But if we know that things are connected, and look for connections, we shall find them hidden beneath the surface. For instance, many big historical changes came apparently from nothing, with no antecedents, no origin. In ancient Greece there is nothing on the surface to explain the seventh century B. C. In the eighth and ninth centuries there was apparently nothing leading up to it; there was no direct line of development. In the same way Gothic art seemingly came out of nothing. It had no history, it appeared instantly. In prehistoric art too, that is, in all that belongs to more than ten thousand years ago, there is nothing on the surface to explain the big Sphinx, for instance. It is both bigger in concept and higher in level, and, so to speak, more clever (though this is not the right word) than anything we know. Who made it? Why are such works of art found in the desert? Then again, take literature, especially that of the East. We can find such things as the great Indian poems and the New Testament which are of a higher level than anything else we know. There is nothing similar to them, nothing ordinary can explain them—all these things are absolutely unique. If they are taken separately and presupposing that they have no inner meaning, they cannot be explained. But if we try to use the psychological method we shall find the connection. Try to think about esotericism, how it is possible, in which form it can exist, in which form it cannot exist. You can read of secret societies in the East, or in Tibet, of the existence of secret libraries, of groups of people living in hidden places and preserving ancient knowledge. This is a crude form of thinking. There is nothing impossible in the idea that there are groups of people of this kind. But the idea of esotericism is more subtle. It does not require secret societies. The idea of secret societies is a simplified form of thinking. It is quite possible that there are people here on the earth who possess much greater knowledge than we do, but if they have this knowledge, they have no need of secret societies. They need not live in the mountains; they can live anywhere. Q. Is it necessary to know an esoteric doctrine to recognize the presence of esoteric ideas?
A. No, you can recognize esoteric ideas by means of the psychological method. Only with the psychological method can you find more in the system which you know. Q. What must one know to use the psychological method? A. The psychological method requires no special knowledge. What is necessary is simple thinking, but not the narrow ordinary thinking. Logical thinking is narrow, but psychological thinking is broader thinking, comparing not two things but maybe as many as five. Logical thinking always deals with two: one must be true, another false. For the psychological method it is not necessarily so; both may be wrong, or both may be right. I will give you an example of the psychological method. In 1915 I gave in St Petersburg a public lecture on Life after Death. I tried to bring together all the existing ideas about life after death: the positivist, scientific idea of death as disappearance, the religious understanding of death connected with the idea of an immortal soul, heaven as reward and hell as punishment; the spiritualistic understanding of the idea of survival; the theosophical idea of reincarnation, the Buddhist idea of recurrence; and many others. What is interesting is that they are all right; they only look contradictory. Logically they contradict one another, but from the point of view of the psychological method they complement one another. In order to illustrate this I asked the question: how can all these ideas be right since they look so different? It is because there is a law we do not understand. The human mind cannot invent anything absolutely wrong. The normal mind, working freely and not tied to some presupposed truth, always arrives at some kind of truth. A complete lie can be invented only by an insane mind or a mind working in chains. Q. Should one know other esoteric teachings and find connections? A. Only in a general way, to find the place of this system. You do not know enough to compare and find connections. When you think about this system and read something that reminds you of it, you take only one or another idea; you do not compare all ideas. Parts can always be analogous, but such comparing can be useful only when you can see the whole behind the parts—and then you may find that the two have nothing in common, because in order to be similar everything must be similar. Suppose one point in one system is similar to one point in another, but these points are surrounded by fifteen other points that have no similarity, this makes them essentially different. We cannot do it yet; we are not accustomed to finding the relation of a part to the whole in ordinary thinking. We think that parts can be compared and that parts can be right or wrong without relation to the whole. Q. But if you find two systems of philosophy that have points or peaks which resemble one another?