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we remember to do it—because in this we depend on chance. When we remember, we must try to be aware of ourselves. This is all we can do. Q. Must you be able to be conscious of your instinctive functions? A. Only of the senses. Inner instinctive work does not need to become conscious. It is conscious for itself, independently of the intellectual function, and there is no need to increase this. We must try to become conscious of ourselves as we see ourselves, not of our inner functions. After some time we may become aware of certain inner functions of which it is useful to be aware; but not yet. You see, we do not acquire any new feelings. We only classify better our ordinary impressions, the ordinary things we get from life, from people, from everything. Q. Would it be correct to say that when learning anything like driving a car, intellectual function tells moving function what to do and that, when proficient, moving function works by itself? A. Quite right. You can observe many things like that. First you learn by intellectual function. Q. How important is the knowledge gained by watching our physical actions? Is this merely an exercise for watching our minds? A. No, it is very important because we mix many things and do not know the causes of many things. We can understand causes only by constant watching for a long time. Q. May we have instruction about how to work on each of the four functions? A. All that will be explained, but for the present, and for a long time, you can only observe. Q. Would it be an example of different 'I's working when one goes to bed late and fully decides to go to bed early next night and, when night comes, does otherwise? A. Quite right, one 'I' decides and another has to do it. Q. How do we set about trying to be more conscious of ourselves? A. This is quite simple to explain, although it is very difficult to achieve. There are no roundabout ways. A better state can only be achieved by direct effort, just by trying to be more conscious, by asking oneself as often as possible, 'Am I conscious or not?' Q. But how does one attain any certainty that your method is right? A. Just by comparing one observation with another. And then we talk when we meet. People speak about their observations; they compare them; I try to explain what they cannot understand; there are other people who help me; and in that way one becomes sure of ordinary things, just as one knows that grass is green. There is no question of faith or belief in all this. Quite the opposite, this system teaches people to believe in absolutely nothing. You must verify everything that you see, hear and feel. Only in that way can you come to something.
At the same time you must realize that our machine docs not work perfectly; it works far from perfectly, because of many wrong functions, so that a very important part of self-study is connected with the study of these wrong functions. We must know them in order to eliminate them. And one of the particularly wrong functions, which we sometimes like in ourselves, is imagination. In this system imagination does not mean conscious or intentional thinking on some subject or visualisation of something, but imagination that turns without any control and without any result. It takes very much energy and turns thinking in a wrong direction. Q. When you say 'imagination', do you mean imagining something to be true, not drawing pictures? A. Imagination has many aspects; it may be just ordinary day-dreams or, for instance, imagining non-existent powers in oneself. It is the same thing, it works without control, it runs by itself. Q. Each one is self-deception? A. One does not take it as self-deception: one imagines something, then believes it and forgets that it was imagination. Studying man in his present state of sleep, absence of unity, mechanicalness and lack of control, we find several other wrong functions which are the result of his state—in particular, lying to himself and to other people all the time. The psychology of ordinary man could even be called the study of lying, because man lies more than anything else; and as a matter of fact, he cannot speak the truth. It is not so simple to speak the truth; one has to learn how to do it, and sometimes it takes a very long time. Q. Would you mind explaining what you mean by lying? A. Lying is thinking or speaking about things that one does not know; this is the beginning of lying. It does not mean intentional lying—telling stories, as for instance that there is a bear in the other room. You can go to the other room and see that there is no bear in it. But if you collect all the theories that people put forward on any given subject, without knowing anything about it, you will see where lying begins. Man does not know himself, he does not know anything, yet he has theories about everything. Most of these theories are lying. Q. I want to know the truth that it is good for me to know in my present state. How can I discover whether it is a lie? A. For almost everything you know you have methods for verifying. But first you must know what you can know and what you cannot. That helps verifying. If you start with that you will soon hear lies, even without thinking. Lies have a different sound, particularly lies about things we cannot know. Q. As regards imagination—if you are thinking instead of imagining, should you be aware of the effort all the time? A. Yes, you will be aware of it—not so much of effort as of control. You
will feel that you control things, they do not just go on by themselves. Q. When you say 'remember yourself', do you mean by that to remember after you have observed yourself, or do you mean to remember the things we know are in us? A. No, take it quite apart from observation. To remember oneself means the same thing as to be aware of oneself—'I am'. Sometimes it comes by itself; it is a very strange feeling. It is not a function, not thinking, not feeling; it is a different state of consciousness. By itself it only comes for very short moments, generally in quite new surroundings, and one says to oneself: 'How strange. I am here'. This is self remembering; at this moment you remember yourself. Later when you begin to distinguish these moments, you reach another interesting conclusion: you realize that what you remember from childhood are only glimpses of self-remembering, because all that you know of ordinary moments is that things have happened. You know you were there, but you do not remember anything exactly; but if this flash happens, then you remember all that surrounded this moment. Q. Can one with observation be aware that one has not got certain things? Is one to observe things from the point of view of everything being possible? A. I do not think it is necessary to use such a word as 'everything'. Just observe, without any guessing, and observe only what you can see. For a long time you just have to observe and try to find out what you can about intellectual, emotional, instinctive and moving functions. From this you may come to the conclusion that you have four definite minds—not only one mind but four different ones. One mind controls intellectual functions, another quite different mind controls emotional functions, a third controls instinctive functions, and a fourth, again quite different, controls moving functions. We call them centres: intellectual centre, emotional centre, moving centre and instinctive centre. They are quite independent. Each centre has its own memory, its own imagination and its own will. Q. In the case of conflicting desires, I presume that if one had enough knowledge of oneself one would be able to see to it that they did not conflict? A. Knowledge by itself is not sufficient. One can know and desires can still be in conflict, because each desire represents a different will. What we call our will in the ordinary sense is only the resultant of desires. The resultant sometimes reaches a definite line of action and at other times cannot reach any definite line, because one desire goes one way and another another way, and we cannot decide what to do. This is our usual state. Certainly our future aim must be to come to oneness instead of being many, as we are now, because in order to do anything rightly, to know anything rightly, to arrive anywhere, we must become one. It is a very far aim, and we cannot begin to approach it until we know ourselves,
because, in the state in which we are now, our ignorance of ourselves is such that when we see it we begin to be terrified that we may not find our way anywhere. The human being is a very complicated machine and has to be studied as a machine. We realize that in order to control any kind of machine, such as a motor car or a railway engine, we should first have to learn. We cannot control these machines instinctively, but for some reason we think that ordinary instinct is sufficient to control the human machine, although it is so much more complicated. This is one of the first wrong assumptions: we do not realize that we have to learn, that control is a question of knowledge and skill. Well, tell me what interests you most in all this and what you want to hear more about. Q. I was interested in the question of imagination. I suppose it means that in the ordinary application of the word one was using the wrong meaning? A. In the ordinary meaning of imagination the most important factor is missed, but in the terminology of this system we begin with what is most important. The most important factor in every function is: 'Is it under our control or not?' So when imagination is under our control we do not even call it imagination; we call it by various names—visualization, creative thinking, inventive thinking—you can find a name for each special case. But when it comes by itself and controls us so that we are in its power, then we call it imagination. Again, there is another side of imagination which we miss in ordinary understanding. This is that we imagine non-existent things—non-existent capacities, for instance. We ascribe to ourselves powers which we do not have; we imagine ourselves to be self-conscious although we are not. We have imaginary powers and imaginary self-consciousness and we imagine ourselves to be one, when really we are many different 'I's. There are many such things that we imagine about ourselves and other people. For instance, we imagine that we can 'do', that we have choice; we have no choice, we cannot 'do', things just happen to us. So we imagine ourselves, really. We are not what we imagine ourselves to be. Q. Is there any difference between imagination and day-dreaming? A. If you cannot control day-dreaming, it means that it is part of imagination; but not all of it. Imagination has many different sides. We imagine non-existent states, non existent possibilities, non-existent powers. Q. Could you give me a definition of negative imagination? A. Imagining all kinds of unpleasant things, torturing oneself, imagining all the things that might happen to you or other people—things like that;
it takes different forms. Some people imagine different illnesses, some imagine accidents, others imagine misfortunes. Q. Is the control of your emotions a reasonable objective? A. Control of emotions is a very difficult thing. It is a very important part of self-study, but we cannot begin with the control of emotions, because we do not understand enough about emotions. I will explain: what we can do from the very beginning of observing the emotional function is to try to stop one particular manifestation in ourselves. We must try to stop the manifestation of unpleasant emotions. For many people this is one of the most difficult things, because unpleasant emotions are expressed so quickly and so easily that you cannot catch them. Yet unless you try you cannot really observe yourself, so from the very beginning, when observing emotions, you must try to stop the expression of unpleasant emotions. This is the first step. In this system we call all these unpleasant, violent or depressing emotions by the name of negative emotions. As I said, the first step is trying not to express these negative emotions; the second step is the study of negative emotions themselves, making lists of them, finding their connections—because some of them are simple and some are compound—and trying to understand that they are quite useless. It sounds strange, but it is very important to understand that all negative emotions are absolutely useless: they do not serve any useful purpose; they do not make us acquainted with new things or bring us nearer to new things; they do not give us energy; they only waste energy and create unpleasant illusions. They can even destroy physical health. Thirdly, after a certain amount of study and observation we may come to the conclusion that we can get rid of negative emotions, that they are not obligatory. Here the system helps because it shows that in fact there is no real centre for negative emotions, but that they belong to an artificial centre in us, which we create in childhood by imitating people with negative emotions by whom we are surrounded. People even teach children to express negative emotions. Then children learn still more by imitation; they imitate older children, older children imitate grown-up people, and so at a very early age they become professors of negative emotions. It is a great liberation when we begin to understand that there are no obligatory negative emotions. We are born without them, but for some unknown reason we teach ourselves negative emotions. Q. To be free from negative emotions, must we be able to stop them arising? A. This is wrong, because we cannot control emotions. I mentioned the different speed of different functions. The slowest is the intellectual function. Next come moving and instinctive functions which have an approximately equal speed which is enormously quicker than intellectual. The emotional function should be still quicker, but generally works at about the same speed as the instinctive function. So moving, instinctive
and emotional functions are very much quicker than thought, and it is impossible to catch emotions by thought. When we are in an emotional state they succeed each other so quickly that we have no time to think. But we can get an idea of the difference in speed by comparing thinking functions with moving functions. If, doing some quick movement, you try to observe yourself, you will see that you cannot. Thought cannot follow movement. Either you have to make the movement quite slow or you cannot observe. This is a definite fact. Q. By movements, do you mean physical movements? A. Yes, ordinary things, like driving a car or writing; you cannot observe anything of that kind. You can remember, and later it creates the illusion of observing. In reality you cannot observe quick movements. So you see, as we are now, real struggle with negative emotions is a question of the future—not a very far future, but there are many things we need to know first and methods which we must study. There is no direct way; we must learn roundabout methods of how to attack them. First of all, we have to change many of our mental attitudes, which are more or less in our power; I mean intellectual attitudes, or points of view. We have too many wrong points of view about negative emotions; we find them necessary, or beautiful, or noble; we glorify them, and so on. We must get rid of all that. So we have to clean our mind in relation to negative emotions. When our mind is right concerning negative emotions, when we have ceased to glorify them, then little by little we shall find a way to struggle with them, each separately. One person finds it easier to struggle with one particular negative emotion, another finds it easier with another. You must begin with the easiest, and what is easiest for me may be the most difficult for you; so you must find the easiest for yourself, and later come to the more difficult. Q. Does that explain why I associate certain of my own negative emotions with people I remember back in my childhood? A. Quite probably, because many negative emotions are learned by imitation. But some may be essentially in our nature, because our nature also has different inclinations one way or another way. Emotions can be divided into groups, and one person may be more inclined to one group and another to another group. For instance, some people have an inclination to different forms of fear, others to different forms of anger. But they are different and do not come from imitation. Q. Are they the hardest to struggle with? A. Yes, but they are generally based on some kind of weakness, because at the basis of negative emotions there generally lies a kind of self-indulgence—one allows oneself. And if one does not allow oneself fears, one allows anger, and if one does not allow anger, one allows self-pity. Negative emotions are always based on some kind of permission. But before we come to such complicated questions as struggle with
negative emotions, it is very important to observe ourselves in small, everyday manifestations of the moving function and also those which we can observe of the instinctive function, that is, our sensations of pleasant and unpleasant, warm and cold—sensations like that which are always passing through us. Q. You have not mentioned identification, but can I ask you a question about it? A. Please. But not everybody here has heard about it, so I will just explain a little. You see, when we begin to observe emotions particularly, but really all other functions as well, we find that all our functions are accompanied by a certain attitude; we become too absorbed in things, too lost in things, particularly when the slightest emotional element appears. This is called identification. We identify with things. It is not a very good word, but in English there is none better. The idea of identification exists in Indian writings and the Buddhists speak of attachment and non-attachment. These words seem to me even less satisfactory because, before meeting this system, I read these words and did not understand—or rather I understood but took the idea intellectually. I understood fully only when I found the same idea expressed in Russian and in Greek by early Christian writers. They have four words for four degrees of identification, but this is not necessary for us yet. We try to understand the idea not by definition but by observation. It is a certain quality of attachment— being lost in things. Q. You lose your sense of observation? A. When you become identified you cannot observe. Q. It usually starts with emotion? Does possessiveness come into it too? A. Yes. Many things. It begins first with interest. You are interested in something, and the next moment you are in it, and do not exist any more. Q. But if you are thinking and conscious of the effort of thinking, does that save you from identification? You cannot do both at once, can you? A. Yes, it saves you for a moment, but the next moment another thought comes and takes you away. So there is no guarantee. You must be on the watch all the time against it. Q. What negative emotions are you likely to glorify?
A. Some people are very proud of their irritability or irritation, or something like that. They like to be thought very hard. There is practically no negative emotion which you cannot enjoy, and that is the most difficult thing to realize. Really some people get all their pleasures from negative emotions. Identification in relation to people takes a special form which is called, in this system, considering. But considering can be of two kinds—when we consider other people's feelings, and when we consider our own. Chiefly we consider our own feelings. We consider mostly in the sense that people somehow do not value us enough or do not think about us enough, or are
not careful enough about us. We find many words for that. This is a very important facet of identification and it is very difficult to be free from it; some people are fully in its power. In any case, it is important to observe considering. For me personally, in the beginning, the most interesting idea was that of self- remembering. I simply could not understand how people could miss such a thing. All European philosophy and psychology just missed this point. There are traces in older teachings, but they are so well disguised and placed between less important things that you cannot see the importance of the idea. When we try to keep all these things in mind and to observe ourselves, we come to the very definite conclusion that in the state of consciousness in which we are, with all this identification, considering, negative emotions and absence of self-remembering, we are really asleep. We only imagine that we are awake. So when we try to remember ourselves it means only one thing—we try to awake. And we do awake for a second but then we fall asleep again. This is our state of being, so actually we are asleep. We can awake only if we correct many things in the machine and if we work very persistently on this idea of awaking, and for a long time. Q. Does bad physical pain distort one's mental ideas? A. Certainly. That is why we cannot speak about it. When we speak about man, we speak about man in his normal state. Then we can speak about obtaining these new functions, consciousness and so on. Exceptional cases cannot be taken, because they distort the whole picture. There are many interesting things in connection with that. This group I met in Moscow used oriental metaphors and parables, and one of the things they liked to speak about was prison—that man is in prison, so what can he wish for, what can he desire? If he is a more or less sensible man, he can wish for only one thing—to escape. But even before he can formulate this desire, that he wants to escape, he must become aware that he is in prison. If he does not realize that he is in prison, he cannot wish to escape. Then, when he formulates this wish, he begins to realize the possibilities of escape, and he understands that, by himself, he cannot escape, because it is necessary to dig under walls, and things like that. He realizes that first of all he must have some people who would like to escape with him—a small group of people. So he realizes that a certain number of people can perhaps escape. But all cannot escape. One cannot and all cannot, but a small number of people can. Again, in what conditions? He comes to the conclusion that it is necessary to have help. Without that they cannot escape. They must have maps, files, tools and so on. so they must have help from outside. This is exactly, almost literally, the position of man. We can learn how
to use the unused parts of our machine. This prison means really that we sit in the kitchen and basement of our house and cannot get out. One can get out, but not by oneself. Without school one cannot. School means that there are people who are already escaping or, at any rate, are preparing to escape. School cannot begin without help from another school, without help from those who escaped before. From them we can get certain ideas, a certain plan, a certain knowledge—these are our tools. I repeat, all cannot escape. There are many laws against it. To put it simply, it would be too noticeable, and that would immediately produce a reaction from mechanical forces. Q. The wish to escape is instinctive, is it? A. No. Only the inner work of the organism is instinctive. It must be intellectual and emotional, because the instinctive function really belongs to the lower, the physical functions. Still, in some conditions, there may be a physical wish to escape. Suppose it is too hot in the room and we know it is cool outside, certainly we may wish to escape. But to realize that we are in prison and that it is possible to escape needs reason and feeling. Q. It seems difficult, without greater self-observation, to know what your objective is in escaping. A. Yes, certainly. Prison is just an example. For us prison is our sleep and, without metaphors, we want to awake when we realize that we are asleep. It must be realized emotionally. We must understand that we are helpless in sleep; anything may happen. We can see pictures of life, see why things happen in one way or another—both big and small things—and realize that it is because people are asleep. Naturally they cannot do anything in sleep. You know, in relation to these ideas and these methods, we live in a rather strange time in one sense, because schools are disappearing quickly. Thirty or forty years ago you could find many kinds of schools which practically do not exist now or are much more difficult to find. Q. Are they disappearing in the East as well as the West? A. I mean the East, of course. In the West there ceased to be any long ago. But about schools I think we had better speak separately. It is a very interesting subject, because we do not know how to make the right divisions. There are different kinds of schools. Q. When you are first trying to observe, is it better to choose a lot of short occupations rather than getting involved in long ones? Does it make a difference? A. No. You must try to observe yourself in different conditions, not only in the same conditions. Q. Is it good, then, to analyse afterwards? A. No. Generally speaking, in the beginning and for a long time, there
should be no analysis. In order to analyse you must know laws; why things happened in that way and could not happen in another way. So before you know the laws, it is better not to try to analyse. Just observe things as they are and try to classify them more or less into intellectual, emotional, instinctive and moving functions. Each of these functions has its own centre or mind through which it manifests. In connection with functions and states of consciousness and from the point of view of his possible evolution, man is divided into seven categories. People are born only in one of the three first categories. A person in whom the instinctive or moving function predominates, and in whom intellectual and emotional functions are less developed, is called man No. 1; but if the emotional function predominates over the other functions he is called man No. 2; and if the intellectual function predominates he is man No. 3. Beyond these three kinds of men, but not born as such, is man No. 4. This means the beginning of change, chiefly in consciousness but also in knowledge and capacity for observation. Next comes man No. 5 who has already developed in himself the third state of consciousness, that is, self-consciousness, and in whom the higher emotional function works. Next is man No. 6 and finally man No. 7, who has full objective consciousness and in whom the higher intellectual function works. Q. How can one recognize a higher man than ourselves as we do not know what to look for? A. When we know better what is lacking in us, what the things are that we ascribe to ourselves but do not possess, we shall begin to see something about it, although actually we can distinguish people of a higher level only by their knowledge. If they know something that we do not know, and if we realize that no one else knows it, and that it could not be learned in any ordinary way, that may serve as a guide. Try to think a little about the characteristics of these seven categories of man. For instance, what could be the general characteristics of man 1, 2 and 3? First of all, sleep. Man 1, 2 and 3, before he begins to study himself in connection with some system which gives him the possibility of self-study, passes all his life in sleep. He only looks as though he is awake; he is really never awake, or occasionally he awakes for a moment, looks round and falls asleep again. This is the first characteristic of man 1, 2 and 3. The second characteristic is the fact that though he has many different 'I's, some of these 'I's do not even know one another. Man can have quite definite attitudes, definite convictions or definite views, and on the other hand he can have quite different convictions, quite different views, quite different likes and different dislikes, and one of them does not know the other. This is one of the chief characteristics of man 1, 2 and 3. Men are very divided and they do not know and cannot know it, because each of these 'I's knows only certain 'I's that it meets by association; other 'I's remain quite unknown. 'I's are divided according to functions; there are
intellectual, emotional, instinctive and moving 'I's. Round themselves they know something, but beyond that they know nothing, so until man begins to study himself with knowledge of this division, he can never come to a right understanding of his functions or reactions. This sleep of man, and absence of unity in him, create another very important characteristic, and this is, the complete mechanicalness of man. Man in this state, man 1, 2 and 3, is a machine controlled by external influences; he has no possibility to resist these external influences, and no possibility to distinguish them from one another, no possibility to study himself apart from these things. He sees himself always on the move, and has a long-established and very strong illusion that he is free to go where he wills, that he can move according to his wish, and that he can go to the right or to the left. He cannot do this; if he moves to the right, that means that he could not move to the left. 'Will' is quite a wrong idea; it does not exist. Will can exist only in man who has one controlling 'I', but as long as he has many different 'I's which do not know one another he has just as many different wills; each 'I' has its own will, there can be no other 'I' or other will. But man can come to a state when he acquires a controlling 'I' and when he acquires will. He can reach this state only by developing consciousness. These are the rudiments of the principles of this system. Now I Just want to say one thing more. We begin with psychology— study of oneself, of the human machine, of states of consciousness, methods of correcting things and so on; but at the same time an important part of the system is given to doctrines of general laws of the world; because we cannot understand even ourselves if we do not know some of the fundamental laws which lie behind all things. Ordinary scientific knowledge is not sufficient for this, because, just as such important points as absence of self remembering were missed in psychology, so our science either forgot or never knew the fundamental laws on which everything is based. As I said, all things in the world, whether big or small, on every scale, are based on two fundamental laws, which in this system are called the Law of Three and the Law of Seven. The Law of Three, in a short description, means that three forces enter into every manifestation, into every phenomenon and every event. They are called (but these are only words, because they do not express their qualities) positive, negative and neutralizing, or active, passive and neutralizing, or still more simply, they may be called first force, second force and third force. These three forces enter into everything. In many cases we understand the need of two forces—that one force cannot create an action, that there is action and resistance. But generally we are not aware of the third force. This is connected with the state of our being, the state of our consciousness. In another state we would be aware of it