It became more and more difficult for me to breathe and to mark time, and to observe the count of breaths and steps. I was pouring with sweat, my head began to turn round, and I thought I should fall. I began to despair of obtaining results of any kind and I had almost stopped when suddenly something seemed to crack or move inside me and my breathing went on evenly and properly at the rate I wanted it to go, but without any effort on my part, while affording me all the amount of air I needed. It was an extraordinarily pleasant sensation. I shut my eyes and continued to mark time, breathing easily and freely and feeling exactly as though strength was increasing in me and that I was getting lighter and stronger. I thought that if I could continue to run in this way for a certain time I should get still more interesting results because waves of a sort of joyful trembling had already begun to go through my body which, as I knew from previous experiments, preceded what I called the opening of the inner consciousness.
But at this moment someone came into the room and I stopped.
Afterwards my heart beat strongly for a long time, but not unpleasantly. I had marked time and breathed for about half an hour. I do not recommend this exercise to people with weak hearts.
At all events this experiment showed me with accuracy that a given exercise could be transferred to the moving center, that is, that it was possible to make the moving center work in a new way. But at the same time I was convinced that the condition for this transition was extreme fatigue. A man begins any exercise with his mind; only when the last stage of fatigue is reached can the control pass to the moving center. This explained what G. had said about "super-efforts" and made many of his later requirements intelligible.
But afterwards, however much I tried I did not succeed in repeating the experiment, that is to say, in evoking the same sensations. It is true that the fast had come to an end and that the success of my experiment had been, to a considerable extent, connected with it.
When I told G. about this experiment he said that without general work, that is, without work on the whole organism, such things could only succeed by chance.
Later on I several times heard descriptions of experiences very similar to mine from people who were studying dances and dervish movements with G.
The more we saw and realized the complexity and the diversity of methods of work on oneself, the clearer became for us the difficulties of the way. We saw the indispensability of great knowledge, of immense efforts, and of help such as none of us either could or had the right to count upon. We saw that even to begin work on oneself in any serious form was an exceptional phenomenon needing thousands of favorable inner and outward conditions. And the beginning gave no guarantee for the future. Each step required an effort, each step needed help. The possibility of attaining anything seemed so small in comparison with the difficulties that many of us lost the desire to make efforts of any kind.
This was an inevitable stage through which everybody passes until they have learned to understand that it is useless to think of the possibility or impossibility of big and distant achievements, and that a man must value what he gets today without thinking of what he may get tomorrow.
But certainly the idea of the difficulty and the exclusiveness of the way was right. And at different times questions arose out of it which were put to G.:
"Can it be possible that there is any difference between us and those people who have no conception of this system?"—"Must we understand that people who are not passing along any of the ways are doomed to turn eternally in one and the same circle, that they are merely 'food for the moon,' that they have no escape and no possibilities?"—"Is it correct to think that there are no ways outside the ways; and how is it arranged that some people, much better people perhaps, do not come across a way, while others, weak and insignificant, come into contact with the possibilities of a way?"
On one occasion while talk was proceeding on these subjects, to which we were constantly returning, G. began to talk in a somewhat different way to what he had done before, because he had previously always insisted on the fact that outside the ways there was nothing.
"There is not and there cannot be any choice of the people who come into touch with the 'ways.' In other words, nobody selects them, they select themselves, partly by accident and partly by having a certain hunger. Whoever is without this hunger cannot be helped by accident. And whoever has this hunger very strongly can be brought by accident to the beginning of a way in spite of all unfavorable circumstances."
"But what of those who were killed and who died from disease in the war for instance?" someone asked. "Could not many of them have had this hunger? And how then could this hunger have helped?"
"That is an entirely different thing," said G. "These people came under a general law. We do not speak of them and we cannot. We can only speak of people who, thanks to chance, or fate, or their own cleverness, do not come under a general law, that is, who stay outside the action of any general law of destruction. For instance it is known through statistics that a certain definite number of people have to fall under trams in Moscow during the year. Then if a man, even one with a great hunger, falls under a tram and the tram crushes him we can no longer speak of him from the point of view of work on the ways. We can speak only of those who are alive and only while they are alive. Trams or war—they are exactly the same thing. One is merely larger, the other smaller. We are speaking of those who do not fall under trams.
"A man, if he is hungry, has a chance to come into contact with the beginning of a way. But besides hunger still other 'rolls' are necessary. Otherwise a man will not see the way. Imagine that an educated European, that is, a man who knows nothing about religion, comes into touch with the possibility of a religious way. He will see 'nothing and he will understand nothing. For him it will be stupidity and superstition. But at the same time he may have a great hunger though formulated intellectually. It is exactly the same thing for a man who has never heard of yoga methods, of the development of consciousness and so on. For him, if he comes into touch with a yoga way, everything he hears will be dead. The fourth way is still more difficult. In order to give the fourth way a right valuation a man must have thought and felt and been disappointed in many things beforehand. He ought, if not actually to have tried the way of the fakir, the way of the monk, and the way of the yogi previously, at least to have known and thought about them and to be convinced that they are no good for him. It is not necessary to understand what I say literally. This thinking process can be unknown to the man himself. But the results of this process must be in him and only they can help him to recognize the fourth way. Otherwise he can stand very near to it and not see it
"But it is certainly wrong to say that unless a man enters one of these ways he has no more chances. 'Ways' are simply help; help given to people according to their type. At the same time the 'ways' the accelerated ways, the ways of personal, individual evolution as distinct from general evolution, can precede it, can lead up to it, but in any case they are distinct from it.
"Whether general evolution is proceeding or not is again another question. It is enough for us to realize that it is possible, and therefore evolu-
' on for people outside the 'ways' is possible. Speaking more correctly there are two 'ways.' One we will call the 'subjective way.' It includes all four ways of which we have spoken. The other we will call the 'objective way.' This is the way of people in life. You must not take the names 'subjective' and 'objective' too literally. They express only one aspect. I take them only because there are no other words."