In Search of the Miraculous
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In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching (1947) by P. D. Ouspensky recollects the teachings of an individual to whom he refers only as "G.", known to be G. I. Gurdjieff, and the author's relationship with "G.", leading to his break with him. He meets "G." in Saint Petersburg before the Russian Revolution of 1917 and follows him through the Caucasus mountains to Constantinople (present day Istanbul), and then to western Europe.
Originally published at the time of G. I. Gurdjieff's death and authorized by Gurdjieff, it is considered one of the best expositions of the structure of Gurdjieff's ideas on consciousness, self-remembering, the three-brained nature of human beings, and his cosmological structure of the universe as nested worlds.
[edit] Extracts
" It was only after the persistent efforts of one of my new acquaintances 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 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 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 guilded 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."
[edit] Page 143
Gurdjieff: "A man does not see the real world. The real world is hidden from him by the wall of imagination. He lives in sleep. He is asleep.
Only by beginning to remember himself does a man really awaken. And then all surrounding life acquires for him a different aspect. He sees that it is the life of sleeping people, a life in sleep. All that men say, all that they do, they say and do in sleep.
How can one awaken? How can one escape this sleep? These questions are the most important, the most vital that can ever confront a man."
