Aphorism: The worse the conditions of life the more productive the work, always provided you remember the work.
In Search of the Miraculous
Chapter 16
…In the carriage with G. there traveled A. (a well-known journalist) who was at that time being sent away from Petersburg (this was just before the revolution). …
A few days later the paper …contained an article “On the Road” in which A. described …impressions he had on the way from Petersburg to Moscow. A strange Oriental … traveled in the same carriage with him, …A. judged him to be an “oil king” from Baku, …he was swarthy, with jet-black eyes, and a mustache like ZeIim-Khan. …
“They worry themselves a great deal,”…He was silent and then continued:
“Yes, in Russia at present there is a great deal of business out of which a clever man could make a lot of money.”
And after another silence he explained:
“After all it is the war. Everyone wants to be a millionaire.” …and I asked him somewhat bluntly:
“And you?… Do not you also want this? …Don’t you make profits too?”
He smiled particularly quietly and said with gravity:
“We always make a profit. It does not refer to us. War or no war it is all the same to us. We always make a profit.”
Views of the Real World
Paris, August 6, 1922 – The Stop Exercise
…The forms of thought and feeling may be called postures of thought and feeling. Every man has a definite number of intellectual and emotional postures, just as he has a definite number of moving postures; and his moving, intellectual and emotional postures are all interconnected. …
In Search of the Miraculous
Chapter 17
“…if a man’s attention is concentrated, let us say, on changing automatic thoughts, then habitual movements and habitual postures will interfere with this new course of thought by attaching to it old habitual associations.
“…as each of man’s functions, thinking, emotional, and moving, has its own definite repertory all of which are in constant interaction, a man can never get out of the charmed circle of his postures.
“Even if a man recognizes this and begins to struggle with it, his will is not sufficient. …
“In order to oppose this automatism and gradually to acquire control over postures and movements in different centers there is one special exercise. It consists in …that…all… arrest their movements at once, no matter what they are doing, and remain …exactly in the same position in which they were caught by the signal …without attempting to protect (themselves) from a blow.
“…This exercise affords a man the possibility of getting out of the circle of automatism and it cannot be dispensed with, especially at the beginning of work on oneself.
“Let us try to follow what occurs. …A movement that has begun is interrupted by this sudden …command to stop …in a position in which he never stays in ordinary life. Feeling himself in this state, that is, in an unaccustomed posture, a man involuntarily looks at himself from new points of view, sees and observes himself in a new way. In this unaccustomed posture he is able to think in a new way, feel in a new way, know himself in a new way. In this way the circle of old automatism is broken. …This exercise taken together with all that has been said is an exercise for self-remembering. A man …must remember himself so as not to take the most comfortable posture at the first moment; …
“But it must be understood that …an order or command from the outside: ‘stop,’ is indispensable. A man cannot give himself the command stop. …The reason for this, as I have said before, is that the combination of habitual thinking, feeling, and moving postures is stronger than a man’s will.
The Reality of Being
130. The miraculous in action
Each act, everything we do …can be either automatic or a creation. In my habitual state I always proceed by repetition. When I have to produce something, the first thing I do is collect my memories on the subject. Then I put together all my experience and all my knowledge, and go forward. My head applies itself, my body follows, and at times I am interested. But all this is merely automatic, and something in me knows it. There is no need for the action to be performed in one particular way or another, and I can do it at a tempo that pleases me. I may succeed in doing something well, but this has no power to change me. It contains no power of action, of creation.
The situation is completely different when my action is not a repetition but something new, an action that can only take place in the present moment to respond to a need I recognize right now. …
In order to act in this way, I need to be free, without any image or idea, without thought trapped in memory. Freedom is not freedom from something, but freedom to be in the present, in a moment that never existed before. …We can even act together with others, provided that, in this moment, all have the same seriousness and intensity. An action depends on the way my energy is engaged at the very moment I act. I have to be conscious of this at the moment of action and feel the movement of the energy going toward its goal. Once the movement has begun, it is too late to intervene. What has been launched no longer belongs to me. Nothing can stop it from giving the results that will follow—whether good or bad, strong or weak, pure or distorted. Everything is thus determined by the disposition of my different centers at the moment of the action. Each act requires a certain freedom of my body, a one-pointedness of my thought, and an interest, a warmth for what is being done. This will bring me a new way of living.