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may survive. But in my opinion it is more important to take this question in relation to eternity. This we cannot verify, but looking at it in relation to eternity means that there is repetition. Life has to be repeated, there cannot be only one life. Try to understand the design of life. You cannot understand it if you think of a straight line, and if you think of circles you find that your brain cannot take it in. Everything living—organic life, people and so on—live and die, and in some mysterious way we do not understand this makes circles; these circles are connected with other circles and the whole design of life is the outcome of it. Every thing, every small unit, turns and turns in its circle, because everything must go on existing. If a gap appeared, the whole structure would be destroyed. Q. Is it because we lack the necessary category of thinking that we cannot understand recurrence, since it is in eternity? A. Yes, if you like. We cannot visualize it, but our higher centres can. If we work, we shall be able to think about it, but only with the help of higher centres—not with our ordinary brain. But before that we must make sure that our ordinary centres do all they can, because at present we do not use our ordinary centres to their full extent. Before we can expect to go over to higher centres, we must learn to use fully all the parts of ordinary centres instead of only the mechanical parts. The idea of recurrence may have many quite obvious faults, but mathematically it is right and is certainly better than any other idea of this nature, because otherwise, without the idea of recurrence, there would be no past. If there is no past, there is no present, and if there is no present, where are we? We cannot live in a world where all the present disappears. Long ago, I wrote about that in Tertium Organum: if we travel by train we cannot expect all the stations we pass to disappear, and those to which we come to be built anew; they existed before we came and will be there when we have passed. We know that everything dies, so it must be born again; everything is destroyed, so it must be built again; and recurrence is the only theory which can answer. Q. If every moment is always co-existing, what makes one feel that one is in this moment? A. The limitations of our mind. Certainly the idea of parallel time means eternity of the moment, but our mind cannot think in that way. Our mind is a very limited machine. We must think in the easiest way and make allowances for it. It is easier to think of repetition than of eternal existence of the moment. You must understand that our mind cannot formulate rightly things as they really are; we must have only approximate formulations which are nearer to truth than our ordinary thinking. That is all that is possible. Our mind and our language are very clumsy instruments and we have to deal with very subtle matters and subtle problems. At the same time we do not realize that by simplifying things, by imagining
ourselves in a three-dimensional world, we make this world non-existent. We put ourselves in an impossible position, because if we take, for instance, the ordinary view of the past disappearing and the future not yet existent, then nothing exists. This is the only conclusion from this idea that is logically possible: either nothing exists or everything exists— there is no third alternative, so to speak. Q. Could you say something about whether it is possible to escape from recurrence? A. You are making the same mistake as do many doctrines. They begin to think about escape before they are sure of the theory. You must first know that recurrence really exists, by remembering, not theoretically. Then you must get tired of it, bored with it. Only then can you think about escape. Q. How can one be quite sure it exists? A. As I said, only by remembering. If you remember that you lived before, what it was like, what happened, then you will know. If you do not remember, you cannot be sure. Theory speaks like that: if you remember yourself in one life, you will remember in the next. If you are unconscious in this life, you will not remember. So first you must become conscious in this life. Q. If one could escape from the law of recurrence, would one still be in the same time or is higher man able to escape into other times? A. No, time has nothing to do with it. Time refers only to one life. Out of one life time does not exist—that you can call eternity. And what do you mean by escaping? There are many different ways to understand this idea. How can you escape from time? It is part of you; it is the same as escaping from your legs or your head. At the same time the idea of escape has meaning—it means escaping from mechanicalness, being one 'I' always, doing what you want. There are many degrees of escape, but this is the beginning. You take this idea too simply. Try to think about what escape means. Q. I cannot reconcile the idea that the past is there, really living, with the idea that it comes back again. A. Do not try to think of it if it is difficult. Leave it. This is why we have to speak about recurrence in simplified forms; our mind cannot think in any other way. This idea is really for higher mental centre which can think rightly. It is almost useless to talk about recurrence, because it becomes philosophy, but there are certain things we can say about it even with our present knowledge, and that is that in relation to school something will remain. Even if one has made a start one will retain something. One cannot forget about it; maybe one will remember earlier and this may help one from one cycle to another, so that if one came to a school once, one may expect to meet a school sooner, which may help. So even by being associated with these ideas we have gained something. In any
case we begin with the advantages of the system. This is the only thing that is assured; all the rest depends on our work. Q. How can recurrence be of advantage to man? A. If one begins to remember and to change, instead of turning each time in the same circle; if one begins to do what one wants and thinks best, then it is of advantage. But if one does not know about it, or even if one knows and does not do anything, then there is no advantage in it at all. Then it means the same things repeated and repeated. Things repeat in one life, so just remembering how things happened yesterday you can avoid certain things to-morrow. Everyone lives in a certain closed circle of happenings—to one person one kind of things happen, to another person another kind. You must know your own types of happenings, and when you know them, you can avoid many things. Q. Having met the system in one recurrence, will one meet it again in the next? A. It depends what one did with the system. One could meet the system and say: 'What nonsense these people talk!' It depends how much effort one makes. If one made efforts one could acquire something, and this may remain, if it was not only in surface personality—if it was not only formatory. Q. Does one necessarily follow some line of action in each recurrence? A. As I said, all acquired tendencies are supposed to repeat themselves. One person acquires a tendency to study or be interested in certain things. He will be interested again. Another acquires a tendency to run away from certain things. Then he will run away again. Q. Do these tendencies grow stronger? A. They may, or they may grow in a different direction. There is no guarantee—until one reaches some conscious action, when one has a certain possibility to trust oneself. If we had enough material we could answer many questions about it. Why, for instance, strange tendencies appear in children, quite opposed to their surrounding circumstances, quite foreign to the people among whom they live. Sometimes they are very strong tendencies that change their life and make them go in totally unexpected ways, when there is nothing in heredity to produce that. This is why it happens in most cases that parents do not understand their children and children do not understand their parents. They never can understand one another sufficiently or rightly. They are quite different people—strangers to one another; they just happened to meet accidentally at a certain station, and then they go in different directions again. Q. When you say 'study children', what do you mean? A. That is what is so difficult. If you observe tendencies on a big scale, you can find quite unexpected things. You can say about one or another tendency that it is the result of surroundings or find another reason for it, yet quite unexpected tendencies may appear in young children, not the
accidental tendencies that appear and disappear, but such as will continue throughout life. According to this theory, these may be tendencies acquired in a previous life in much later years, and then they appear very early. Q. From the point of view of recurrence, then, may it not be that some important actions we made in a previous life are responsible for our tendencies now? A. Quite possibly. Only, there is one thing: this work did not exist before. It may be that some other work did—there may be many different kinds— but not this. This work did not exist before, that I am perfectly sure of. Q. What I meant was that it seems such a huge idea to think that between now and the time we die we make the fatal actions which will give us tendencies for next time. A. Certainly. Every moment of our lives we may create tendencies we may not be able to get rid of for ten lives. That is why in Indian literature they always emphasize this point. It may be in the form of a fairy tale, but the principle is the same. Q. You say that this work has not occurred before. Does this mean also that it will not occur again? A. There is no guarantee. For yourself it will depend on you. Certainly one thing can be certain—it will not happen in the same way. Maybe there will be groups and schools, only not in the same way and not at the same time. Work is the only thing which is not under the law of recurrence, otherwise it would not be work. If it is a little conscious, it cannot recur in the same form. If we take this particular work, many things in it may happen quite differently. For instance, what happened now at a certain time may begin perhaps twenty years earlier. Q. If schools do not recur in the same way, does it mean that a person can only meet a school in one life? A. No, that is introducing another idea. It is more simple than that. Recurrence, if it exists, is mechanical and based on mechanicalness. A school cannot be mechanical, so it must be under different laws, even if it is an elementary school. If a school existed once in one form, next time it may be not in the same place, the same time or the same form. How it would change it is impossible to say, but it cannot be the same thing, otherwise it would be mechanical, and if it is mechanical it is not a school. Q. Then it means that an individual who came across a school might not find it next time? A. He may find another, maybe a better one, or he may find nothing. The kind of school one could or could not meet next time depends on many unknown reasons, but only quite petrified things can be repeated again and again without change. Things that are alive can never be the same. You can rely on something like Trafalgar Square recurring, but you cannot rely on schools from the point of view of recurrence.
Q. Then, since schools are not mechanical, if we recur there is no assurance that we should ever find this system again? A. No assurance, quite right, but there are many sides to it. It is quite true that things do not recur in exactly the same form, but at the same time one cannot lose anything one has acquired. This means that if one loses one possibility one can find another. One can lose only through one's own fault, not through the fault of things, although it is necessary to understand and remember that possibilities are not unlimited. There is recurrence in a sense, at least there may be, but, as I said, there can be no 'eternal' recurrence in the literal sense of the word for every thing, whether big or small. There are different manifestations and what we expect to be eternal may not be eternal at all. Everybody has only a limited number of chances. If people live an ordinary life and do not accumulate right influences, do not form a magnetic centre, then after some time they lose even the possibility of forming one. They may die out, because there is big competition. . . . There are many things we do not know about it all, but the first thing that must be understood about recurrence is that it is not eternal. I see from people's questions that some of them do not realize how very rare the possibility of development is and how many people there are who never come to it. Neither do they realize how many dangers, both external and internal, surround this possibility. As to the chance of meeting the same school again, I felt that people were even astonished that they might not meet it, that this possibility might not be there for ever. Actually, all that refers to schools is bound to be outside ordinary laws, so that nothing can happen in exactly the same way That does not mean there will be no other possibilities, but one must be prepared for them. The school cannot run away from one, the only person that can run away is oneself, but one has to be ready to meet it, one must prepare oneself, even if there are ten thousand lives. Nothing comes by itself. If it comes by itself, one will lose it. One can get only as much as one is prepared for, and one can be prepared only by one's own efforts. In this work there are no guarantees. You do not receive degrees for the length of time you stayed in the work. Every day you go through an examination and every day you can either pass or fail. Q. As it is so rare and difficult to meet with school, I am so afraid one might recur in conditions that would make it impossible. A, I think there is very little chance of that because, if we take this theory of recurrence, one will be born in the same circumstances, the same time, the same period. Even if for some reason things are not repeated exactly, you will find something else, especially if you remember something of your past life. In any case there will be more chance than if you did not know anything. Q. Is it true then that none of us had ever met this system before?
A. I think it is quite true. But possibly you met something similar. However, the fact that I think so will not mean anything to you; you must find out for yourself why I think so. Q. Is there any certainty that if you start work in one life you will be able to continue it afterwards? A. Again, speaking theoretically, you will begin from the same place where you left off. The more you get now, the easier it will be to begin. It is the same as taking it from one day to another: the relation is the same. For instance, you begin to learn something to-day, and to-morrow you continue—you do not need to begin again from the beginning. But if you only pretend to be learning, if you look at the book and let yourself dream instead, then next time you will have to start from the beginning. Q. Does change of being this time increase magnetic centre next time? A. Oh no, magnetic centre must be made in personality, so you will have to make it again next time. You cannot receive it ready made from past life. Q. Could a tendency in one recurrence become a habit in the next? A. It depends on the tendency. If it is mechanical, it will become a habit. If it is conscious, it cannot become a habit, because they are two different things. Q. Thinking back over my life I see certain cross-roads where some decisions were taken which I think were wrong. Is there any particular thing I can do in this recurrence so as not to repeat the same mistakes in the next? A. To a certain extent; everything is to a certain extent. If we look back we may find moments which we can call cross-roads. If we do not study these, we may make mistakes and take for cross-roads points which were not real cross-roads and so miss real cross-roads. One can think, one can change now as regards those particular points, and if it is sufficiently deep, one will remember; if it is not so deep, one may remember. In any case there is a chance that with time one may not do the same thing again, for this question of inevitably turning one way or another way may be more inevitable or less inevitable. Q. If we can perceive these cross-roads, can we make use of them? A. There is no question of making use. It is a question of studying them in the past, not in the future. We do not know enough to think about 'doing'. It is only formatory thinking that always starts with the idea of 'doing'. Q. If we can make any choice, how might that affect recurrence? A. Recurrence cannot be affected directly. According to the idea of recurrence nothing changes, only you can change. If you change, then many things can change in recurrence. Many ideas and things can pass from one
life to another in this way. For instance, someone asked what one could get from the idea of recurrence. If one became intellectually aware of this idea and it became part of one's essence, that is, part of one's general attitude to life, then one would not forget it and it would be an advantage to know it early in the next life. Q. Is it right to think that we cannot go on living for ever, that is, dying and being born again? A. Quite right. People with a quite mechanical life have a longer time, and people who become conscious have a shorter time; that is the only difference. It looks very unjust, but at the same time mechanical people can get into very unpleasant circumstances. Suppose that through some external accident connected with historical events, such as wars or something like that, somebody dies very young and continues to die young every time, then only a very exceptional combination of circumstances can introduce a change in his case. Q. In a case when an accident affects one's whole life, does it recur? A. Yes, the same kind of accident may repeat itself. You must not forget that we speak only about a theory, but a theory may be better or worse, nearer or further from possible facts. In mechanical life even things which happen do not bring any practical change. Things are important only when a man begins to awake. From this moment things become serious. So are you asking about mechanical recurrence or about the beginning of awakening? Q. I had in mind the possibility of meeting a school next time. A. As I said, schools are more free from recurrence compared with things in life. Many things may be repeated exactly as they are now, and some may change. It is the same as when you go about you see different things: people, trees, buses, cars, houses, lamp-posts; some things stand still and some move. Wars, revolutions and other such things are like lamp-posts, but conscious things are like the light from passing cars. If you go out, you will always see the same lamp posts, but you are not likely to see the same cars. Q. Is it that opportunity never comes twice? A. Not the same opportunity, it would be waste of time. When people meet with certain opportunities, they become responsible for the energy spent on them. If they do not use it, it does not recur. Lamp-posts stay fixed; cars do not stay, they are not made for standing still but for moving. It is useful to think that the same opportunities may not recur next time. We expect things to be the same, but they may be different. It may depend on other people; other people may begin earlier. For example, I began these lectures in England in 1921, but next time I may begin in 1900. You will be prepared only for 1921, but in 1921 there may no longer be an opportunity for you. This should not be taken literally; it is just an example for thinking about.
Q. It is very difficult to think about preparing for meeting the system earlier. A. You can prepare nothing. Only remember yourself, then you will remember next time. The whole difficulty lies in negative emotions; we enjoy them so much that we have no interest in anything else. Q. Is the starting-point in the work the same for everybody, or do we have different starting-points? A. Very, very different; people begin on different levels. We do not know our history in the sense of past lives. Some people have already done some work, although it is impossible to say in what form. Some people only begin while others have already many efforts behind them, so everybody begins differently. But in school all have to go through the same things and sometimes for people who have more material it is more difficult than for people who have less. Individually it is very different. Some people cannot be responsible for some time, others can. Some can work with new people, others must only listen for a long time. Q. Is it of practical use to think of events of one's life when trying to self-remember, with a view to fixing them for future recurrence? A. No, this is not practical. First, as I said many times already, it is necessary to be sure about future recurrence; and secondly, it is necessary to be sure of remembering yourself. If you put it in the way you did, it will only transform itself into imagination. But if you first try to remember yourself without adding anything to it, and then, when you can, also try to remember your past life—you remember I spoke about trying to find cross-roads—then in combination it will be very useful. Only do not think you can do it yet, because you cannot. There are many ways of trying to think of your own life in four dimensions. Now we can take it only psychologically, in relation to our own life. Suppose you put yourself back ten years and find that you remember certain moments very well. Then imagine that you know all that will happen, and that you have to live it all over again, knowing it all —live through all the mistakes, all the nonsense and so on. Then you will have a different view of the whole thing. Everything is in you now if you study your life by going backwards and then forward again. By using your imagination you will do it consciously. But you must not try and change anything. Then you will re-live these ten years and see that everything happens in the same way as before, and at the same time you know that everything is to happen in the same way. Q. How can one remember well enough? A. It is necessary to find moments you remember well. Some people remember better than others. But for those people who do not remember well it will be specially useful, because all life must be absolutely clear. This is a dissecting-room; only in an ordinary dissecting-room they deal with dead bodies, whereas here you cannot deal with other people until you know everything about yourself.
Q. What do you do when you get to a moment when you forget what happened? A. There is in us memory of absolutely everything, but it may be what one may call 'frightened'. However, if you insist, then, little by little, things will appear and you will find that you can think of words, moods, feelings and people. This shows that psychology cannot be studied apart from yourself. In study of all your life you have a whole museum before you. Q. You said a few minutes ago that one went on from where one left off in another life. Does it mean that if you become man No. 4 in this life you will be born No. 4 in the next? A. That I do not know. I think it is better to say that it will be easier to become No. 4. You see, with a big change of being like that of passing from one degree to another degree, one falls under many new laws. How this works, I do not know. We can speak only about our own situation because that we know, and we can say that we can expect comparatively small changes—more knowledge, more consciousness and, with luck, a little more conscience or hunger. But we cannot speak of big changes such as passing from one degree to another. Still, even a slight change is a change, and it is better to think about small changes which we can measure. You see, in connection with all these questions, it is very useful to realize what we can know. These questions are asked as though we could know the answers, but just five minutes of thinking would show that we cannot, because if we could, probably we would have had the answers long ago. In order to answer these questions practically it is necessary to have a better instrument; if we could use this instrument with a bigger range, perhaps we would have concrete answers, but not with the ordinary brain we have now. Q. I do not understand the connection between change of state and change of circumstances. A. They are different. Circumstances change by themselves and state changes only as a result of work, and many causes by which the state can change do not depend on circumstances. One must understand how things happen. It is useful to think about these things, but it is easy to make mistakes. One mistake is that we think things could be different. This is true only of ourselves. All causes governing big external events were created long ago, and it is not really our subject—we have no time to study those things in detail. But we must study ourselves in detail. Q. If a person ceases to be born in his particular period, what happens to all the other lives with which he is in contact? A. This is one of the very difficult problems to understand. As far as we can see in this theory, one cannot start being born at once. Being born is also a process like everything else: one fades out little by little, and this
fading out does not produce any big effect. Some people can fade out, others have to remain, such as people connected with historical events and things like that. They are in a most unpleasant position, they just turn round and round, and most of them are quite dead. Q. Is it then impossible for great people in historical movements to escape from life? A. In most cases it is too late for them to escape; they are dead already, they are almost losing their bones on the way, but they have to continue to exist and turn round. That is one of the mysteries of life—that it is governed by dead people. Q. I do not see why big historical figures are so important that they must continue to recur even when they become dead? Why wouldn't it be easy to find substitutes for them? A. Easy for whom? Evidently they fit into some conditions and so continue to go round in the same way even if they die and people take them for living beings. Perhaps it is their chief feature that they are dead, for then they cannot make a mistake—they do exactly the same things over and over again. Q. You speak of dead people recurring, but I thought essence could not die? A. It can die relatively, in the sense that it cannot develop. Mechanically it may exist, but it cannot grow, it can only deteriorate with time. Essence can die in many different ways. It may die only for this life or it may die completely. It can die completely only as a result of a long period of wrong actions, actions against conscience. Killing essence means killing conscience. Or it can die in this life and be born again, safe and sane, in the next. For instance, one can fall on one's head and essence may die in the sense that it will not develop any further. But in the next life it will live again. So in speaking about death of essence we must know which case we mean, accidental or intentional. In thinking about life, we forget that many people are dead and that sleeping people easily fall under the influence of dead people. Q. Are most people dead? A. This question was much discussed in our group in St Petersburg. Some thought that most people were dead, but I was always against this. Everybody is asleep, but even in life you find pleasant people who may not work through laziness, lack of opportunity, or something else. But they are not dead. Q. How can dead people influence sleeping people? A. In comparison with sleeping people they are very strong, because they have no conscience and no shame. What makes ordinary people weak? Conscience and shame. Besides, if people are asleep, anything can happen to them, they can be stolen out of their beds. All people in life are asleep, but not all are dead—yet. At the same time,
if one cannot accept and use B influence at all, there is nothing to keep one from dying sooner or later. B influences are sent to keep men from dying, even though they are asleep. But if they reject them, there is nothing to prevent their dying. People are not equal in relation to evolution. Some can evolve, others cannot. Either they lost the possibility of evolution or they have done nothing to deserve it. Q. Is there any difference between clairvoyance and memory of recurrence? A. Real clairvoyance, apart from fantastic descriptions, is a function of the higher emotional centre, which means a function of man No. 5. Everything below that is either lies or imagination. It is quite possible sometimes to have glimpses of higher centres, but it is not reliable and no one can control it except man No. 5 —and he must be a complete No. 5. If a man crystallizes and becomes almost No. 5, but without having been man No. 4, he is not complete and so he cannot fully use these powers. But if one attains the third state of consciousness, this development of consciousness means the functioning of the higher emotional centre which has a bigger range of vision than our ordinary vision. Q. Is it possible to have any understanding of recurrence if one cannot grasp questions of dimensions and different times? A. I think it is possible to understand, but we must first agree about terms. As a theory it has a psychological, a mathematical and what we may call a physical side, and I think the psychological side can be understood without necessarily understanding the ideas of dimensions and space. After all, what is important is not the mathematical side. It is only a theory of life which is, so to speak, mathematically sound. But we cannot speak about it as a fact. It can be explained in another way. The idea of recurrence can be connected with the life of humanity. Individual time ends and one becomes connected with the life of a bigger entity—humanity. It means only one thing: if man remains mechanical, he can recur ten thousand times and will not profit by it. The fact of recurrence does not change anything by itself. But if one begins to work, it becomes enormous; it is the only principle which can explain certain things. But by itself ten thousand lives or one life are just the same. Q. Do all events in history come again, such as wars and revolutions? A. We are now speaking about individual recurrence; we cannot pass straight from that to historical events. At the same time we can say that these things will repeat. They are produced by mechanical forces and mechanical people, so those people will be in the same conditions as before externally. The thing we must understand is that if nothing changes now, nothing will change again. Suppose there are some people who remember; what can they do? Others do not remember, and they are more sure of their opinions and less inclined to listen to reason. And
remembering events depends on self-remembering. If you become conscious now, then if there is a next life, you will remember what happened. If you do not remember yourselves, how can you remember things and events? Q. Does it mean that the situation of world events will always be the same for me? A. You must understand that each world, from the point of view of recurrence, is within another world. The situation can change in one of the bigger worlds and affect the world inside it. There are many things in relation to this that our mind is incapable of thinking about in the right way. If we could think more definitely and clearly, we would see more. There is one thing I want to add in relation to worlds. As long as the Absolute exists, all other things must exist; they have no right to die. Even if they die, they are repeated and repeated as long as the Absolute exists. But all this is theory. In the system recurrence is not necessary. It may be interesting and useful; you can even start with this idea, but for actual work on yourself it is not necessary. This is why we are not given this idea in the system. It came from outside, from me, from literature. It docs fit, it does not contradict the system, but it is not needed because all we can do we can do only in this life. If we do nothing in this life, the next life will be just the same, or there will be slight variations but no positive change. If recurrence exists, we cannot change it. There is only one thing we can change: we can try to awake and hope to remain awake. If we have to come back, we cannot stop it. We are in a train, the train is going somewhere. All we can do is to pass the time in the train differently—do something useful or spend it quite uselessly.