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none. As regards another person's will, for the purposes of classification, every intentional action of another person may be called the result of this person's will. In studying human life it becomes clear that these definitions are not sufficient. It becomes necessary to introduce between accident and fate the law of cause and effect which controls a certain part of events in man's life, for the difference between events controlled by accident in the strict sense of the word and events resulting from cause and effect becomes abundantly clear. From this point of view we see a considerable difference between people in ordinary life. There are people in whose life the important events are the result of accident. And there are other people in whose case the important events of their life are always the result of their previous actions, that is, depend on cause and effect. Further observation shows that the first type of people, that is people depending on accident, never come near school work, or if they do, they leave very soon, for one accident can bring them and another can just as easily lead them away. Only those people can come to the work whose life is controlled by the law of cause and effect, that is who have liberated themselves to a considerable extent from the law of accident or who were never entirely under this law. Q. You said that man is a machine moved by external influences. Where then does control come in? A. There is no control. We must change to have control. Things happen all around us and we are affected by them. At every moment our life is intersected by other lines, so that accident controls most events. The action of one machine affects another machine. We are surrounded by possibilities of accident; if one does not happen, another does. We must understand our situation. In men 1, 2 and 3 there is no control; practically everything in their life is controlled by accident. There are some things which are the results of their own actions, but they are all on the same level. Control begins on a different level, and it starts with ourselves: control of our reactions, states of consciousness, functions and so on. Then, little by little, we may come to some measure of control in the sense of avoiding one influence and approaching another. It is a very slow process. Q. When do we cease to be under the law of accident? A. When we develop will. To be completely free from the law of accident is very far, but there are different stages between complete freedom and our present position. In ordinary conditions accident is opposed to plan. A man who in one or another case acts according to plan escapes in these actions from the law of accident. But actions conforming to plan are impossible in ordinary life except in conditions where the combination of accidental happenings chances to coincide with the plan. The reasons why it is impossible to fulfil a plan in life are, first of all,
the absence of unity and constancy in man himself, and the new lines which continually enter man's line of actions and cross it. This can be easily verified if a man tries to follow a plan in anything that does not happen or is opposed to the general trend of momentums operating in his life; for instance, if a man tries to remember himself, to struggle with habits, to observe himself, and so on. He will see that his plan is not being fulfilled and the result is quite different from what he intended, or that everything stops altogether and even the initial impulse and the understanding of the necessity and usefulness of these attempts vanishes. But if he continues to study himself, to make efforts, to work, he will see that his relation to the law of accident gradually changes. Our being subject to the law of accident is a definite fact that cannot be changed completely. Such as we are we will always be under a certain possibility of accident. Yet little by little we can make accidental happenings less possible. The theory of accidents is very simple. They happen only when the place is empty; if the place is occupied, they cannot happen. Occupied by what? By conscious actions. If you cannot produce a conscious action, at least it must be filled by intentional actions. So when work and everything connected with it becomes in truth the centre of gravity of man's life, he becomes practically free from the law of accident. Q. What do you call a centre of gravity? A. The idea of centre of gravity can be interpreted in many different ways. It is a more or less permanent aim and the realization of the relative importance of things in connection with this aim. This means that certain interests become more important than anything else—one acquires a permanent direction, one does not go one day in one direction and another day in another; one goes in one direction and one knows the direction. The stronger your centre of gravity, the more you are free from accident. When you change your direction every moment, then every moment something new may happen and every accident can turn you one way or another way. But if your intentional activity, such for instance as self-remembering, becomes so definite, so intense and so continual as to leave no place for accidents, accidents will be much less likely to happen, because accidents need space and time. So we have to add more causes which will produce results and in this way simply exclude accident, because the more our time is occupied with conscious work the less room will be left for accidental happenings. Q. If one does not identify, if one does not consider, if one does not have negative emotions, would this be creating new causes? A. Naturally. But since we always identify, always consider and have negative emotions, we cannot experience that. We must see that even to have one negative emotion less would be a new cause. Q. How is it possible to live under two such different laws as the law of accident and the law of cause and effect?
A. I see no contradiction. Cause and effect in relation to the laws under which man lives means result of your own actions, and 'accident' means something happening to you without relation to your action. Q. Can we direct or mould the law of accident now, or must we wait till we have full consciousness? A. There is no question of waiting: if one waits, one never gets anything—at every moment one must do what one can. At the present moment we can to a certain extent mould the law of accident only by moulding ourselves. The more control we have of ourselves, the more the law of accident changes and, as I said, later accidents may even practically disappear, although theoretically the possibility will always remain. Q. How do we create new causes? Does it mean making plans? A. No, you usually make the same plans you have made all your life and expect to have new causes. Q. I should like to know how to lessen the effect of accident upon one's work. When I make a plan for the day, it is often spoiled by people coming unexpectedly. A. Leave such cases alone. What is important is people or 'I's in us coming in and stopping our work. For instance, a negative emotion comes in and stops work. That is what we must prevent. Q. Accident need not always be a bad accident? It can also be a happy one, can't it? A. Quite right. But our aim is to get rid of accident, and after some time, if we work, we may become free of both good and bad accidents. Ask yourself whether it will be better. Try to understand how much we expect from good accidents and how difficult life would become if we had to 'do' everything and if nothing 'happened'. Q. Is one partly free from the law of accident if one is in a school? A. No, this would be too simple. Just being there does not change anything. I have just explained that one begins to get out from under the law of accident if one acquires what we call a centre of gravity, which means that work on oneself becomes especially important, sufficiently important to occupy a big place in man's life. This creates a certain kind of balance and, little by little, dispenses with accident. Q. Did you mean that when we are more conscious we are no longer affected by the law of accident? A. Again, it is not being conscious that does it by itself. When inner accidents stop in us, it will make us more free from external accidents. There are too many accidental things in ourselves and, as I said, we can get rid of these accidental things only by creating a centre of gravity, a certain permanent weight, weight in the sense that it keeps us more balanced. And for this we need a school. Q. Why are you so sure that one cannot develop except through a school?
A. There are so many difficulties. If you try to understand these difficulties you will see that without method, and without help, one cannot move— one will remain what one is, or rather one will go down, for nothing remains in the same state. If one does not develop, one goes down. In life, in ordinary conditions everything goes down, or one capacity may develop at the expense of another. All capacities cannot develop without the help of school, for system and method are necessary. But before speaking of why schools are necessary it must be realized for whom they are necessary, because schools are not necessary at all for the vast majority of people. They are necessary only to those who already realize the inadequacy of knowledge collected by the ordinary mind and who feel that, by themselves, with their own strength they can neither resolve the problems which surround them nor find the right way. Only such people are capable of overcoming the difficulties connected with school work, and only for them are schools necessary. And in order to understand why schools are necessary one must realize that the knowledge which comes from men of higher mind can be transmitted only to a very limited number of people simultaneously and that the observance of a whole series of definite conditions, without which knowledge cannot be transmitted correctly, is necessary. The existence of these conditions and the impossibility of doing without them explains the necessity of an organization. The transmission of knowledge demands efforts both on the part of him who receives it and on the part of him who gives it. The organization facilitates these efforts or makes them possible. These conditions cannot come about by themselves. A school can only be organized according to a certain definite plan worked out and known long ago. There can be nothing arbitrary and improvised in schools. But schools can be of different types corresponding to different ways. I shall speak about different ways later. Q. Can it be explained in what these conditions consist? A. These conditions are connected with the necessity of a simultaneous development of knowledge and being. As I said before, the development of one without a corresponding development of the other gives wrong results. Schools are necessary to avoid such one-sided development and the undesirable results connected with it. The conditions of school teaching are such that from the very first steps work progresses simultaneously along two lines, the line of knowledge and the line of being. From the first days at school a man begins to study mechanicalness and to struggle against mechanicalness in himself, against involuntary actions, against unnecessary talk, against imagination, against the expression of negative emotions, against day dreaming and against sleep. In making a step along the line of knowledge a man must make a step along the line of being. The principles of school work, all the demands made upon him, all help him to study his being and to work to change it.
Q. If there is no hope of attaining a higher degree of consciousness without a school, this would exclude so many who, through no fault of their own, never come into contact with the right school and yet who urgently desire to progress? A. It is impossible to account for these things, because man lives to such an extent under the law of accident, and individual man is so small and insignificant. We think we are very important, but in reality we are not important at all. In order to become important we must become something first, for such as we are we are practically nothing. Who could be interested in our development except ourselves? So actually meeting a school that corresponds to one's type—for one may meet a school that does not correspond to one's type or one's development—is to a great extent a matter of luck. Q. Would it not be a case of wanting sufficiently, for it is said, 'seek and ye shall find'? A. With the exception of very difficult circumstances, when fate, accident and cause and effect are all going against a man, if a man really seeks he can find. He will look for a school with the help of his magnetic centre; but if magnetic centre is not formed, he cannot start. Q. Where are the schools leading? A. This is an interesting question because it also answers other questions about the differences in men. With the help of a school you can attain what you want, but first you must formulate what you want. A question was asked earlier about whether a school leads machines to what is good for them. If it is a real school, it will not lead machines anywhere, because machines have their own fate in the universe and no one can do anything for them. But a school can help people who are tired of being machines; it can show them the way to cease to be machines and teach them how it can be done. That is all that a school can do, and without a school it cannot be achieved. Q. What constitutes a school? A. Speaking generally, a school is a place where one can learn something. There can be schools of modern languages, schools of music, schools of medicine and so on. But the kind of school I mean is not only for learning but also for becoming different. It was explained before that nobody can work alone, without a school. Also it must be clear to you by now that a group of people who decide to work by themselves will arrive nowhere, because they would not know where to go and what to do. So we can say that a school is an organization for the transmission to a certain number of prepared people of knowledge coming from higher mind. This is the most essential characteristic of a school. Another very important fact is the selection of students. Only people of a certain preparation and a certain level of understanding are admitted to a real school. A school cannot be open to all, it cannot be open to many. Schools
can be of very different levels depending on the preparation and the level of being of the students. The higher the level of the school, the greater the demands made upon the students. So from this point of view schools are divided into degrees. There are schools where men No. 1, 2 and 3 learn how to become No. 4 and acquire all the knowledge that will help them in this change. The next degree are schools where men No. 4 learn to become No. 5. There is no need for us to speak of further degrees, since they are too far from us. But even in schools of the lowest degree the beginning of school-work already means a certain preparation. One cannot pass straight from the absurdity of ordinary life to school. Even if a school does all that is possible to give a man something, if he is not prepared, if he does not know how to take it, it cannot be given. Q. What does being prepared mean? A. It is first of all necessary to be ready for any level on which one can begin, not only from the point of view of knowledge, but also from the point of view of being. One must realize one's situation, know what one cannot do by oneself, realize that one needs help, and many other things. It depends on what a person needs in a school. Nobody needs a school as such, but if one does need something, then one needs a school in order to get it. Being prepared means that one must already know oneself to a certain extent; one must know one's aim; one must know the value of one's decisions; there must be a certain elimination of lying to oneself; one must be able to be sincere with oneself. Unfortunately C influence very often becomes B influence if people come to a school unprepared. Later, perhaps after a long time, they may hear the same things that they heard when they first came and discover a new meaning in them. Then this becomes C influence. There are many ideas which, if understood rightly, can become C influence. Besides, one can only enter a school when one has already lost, or is prepared to lose, at least a certain amount of self-will. Self-will is the chief obstacle to entering a school, because a school means not only learning but also discipline. And some people may find discipline boring, or unnecessary. Q. Is there a form of examination that one must pass before one can enter a school? A. Examination is almost continuous, it goes on all the time, and not only before one enters a school but also when one is in the school. Q. There must be a reason why some people see the possibility of change and others do not. A. Yes, there are reasons. It is a kind of previous training of the mind. Most people have the same chance, but some accumulate material and are prepared for change, and others not. But even if they are prepared they need help and have to make efforts. Q. Can people wish to change and find it impossible?
A. Sometimes resistance is too great; for instance, imagination may be too strong and they may refuse to give it up. Or, as I said, sometimes magnetic centre may be formed in a wrong way. There are people with two or more magnetic centres looking in different directions. Then they can never be interested in the same thing for long. But if one has a rightly formed magnetic centre, all these interests become connected and it may be a very powerful thing. Q. You say that if people are unprepared C influence becomes B influence for them. Is it because they have nothing to judge it by? A. Not only because of that; it is because they have no valuation of ideas, they take all ideas on the same level. Q. Do negative emotions prevent one taking in C influence? A. If you have a great deal of negative emotion it forms a cloud which prevents not only C influence but even A influence getting to you. It has been established long ago that, although C influences exist, one cannot get them by oneself. This means that there is something one has to conquer in order to understand, and in order to understand more one has to conquer something else. This is why school is necessary. In school you cannot deceive yourself and it can be explained to you why you do not understand. As I said, there are many degrees of schools. Schools that begin on the ordinary level of life are very elementary. In them there are necessarily certain rules and conditions. If one forgets them, or makes excuses for oneself, one cannot really consider oneself as being in a school. Q. Can one be disciplined to school life without being disciplined to ordinary conventions? A. School discipline is based on understanding—it is quite different. Q. Isn't there a danger of taking discipline as escape from responsibility? A. Then one will fail. Q. To what extent can one develop being without a school? A. No real development of being is possible without schools, or rather, it is possible to a certain extent, but it is generally incomplete. Right development of being is impossible without schools, because one cannot look after oneself, one cannot be sufficiently strict with oneself. And it is not only a question of being strict—one simply cannot remember things at the right time, one will forget or one will make things easy for oneself. If it were possible to work by oneself, schools would be a waste of time and systems would not be necessary; but since they exist, it means that it is impossible without them. One can have no plan, no system by oneself. How can one develop without a plan or system? How can any work be done? How can one get the necessary knowledge, understand one's position, know what to do? One cannot even get preliminary knowledge with which to start. Q. Do schools necessarily contain people of higher consciousness?
A. Not contain, we cannot expect that, but, as I said, a school cannot be started without knowledge coming from men of a higher mind. Q. Will a school help me to make decisions that will affect the future? A. All that I can say is that what you do to-day will make to-morrow, so to-morrow depends on what you do to-day. You can change the future now—that is what must be understood. In ordinary life you cannot change anything, but when you begin to know more you have more power to change. Schools are not all the same. For some kind of people one kind of school is necessary, for another kind of people there is another kind of school. There is no universal school for all kinds of people. This brings us to the subject of different ways. But before speaking about the ways it is necessary to realize that thousands of years ago people came to the idea that man can change, that he can acquire something he has not got. What he can acquire was expressed differently and approached from different angles, but the general idea was always the same—that man can develop, that he can acquire something new. So there were formed three ways corresponding to the division of man into man No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3. The first way is the way of the Fakir. It is a long, difficult and uncertain way. A fakir works on the physical body, on conquering physical pain. The second way is the way of the Monk. This way is shorter, more sure and more definite. It requires certain conditions, but above all it requires faith, for if there is no faith a man cannot be a true monk. The third way is the way of the Yogi, the way of knowledge and consciousness. When we speak about the three ways we speak about principles. In actual life they are seldom met with in a pure form, for they are mostly mixed. But if you know the principle, when you study school practices you can separate which practice belongs to which way. When we speak of yogis we really take only Jnana-Yoga and Raja-Yoga. Jnana-Yoga is the yoga of knowledge, of a new way of thinking. It teaches to think in different categories, not in the categories of space and time and of causality. And Raja- Yoga is work on being, on consciousness. Although in many respects these ways are very efficient, the characteristic thing about them is that the first step is the most difficult. From the very first moment you have to give up everything and do what you are told. If you keep one little thing, you cannot follow any of these ways. So, although the three ways are good in many other respects, they are not sufficiently elastic. For instance, they do not suit our present mode of life. The Fakir is an exaggerated No. 1 man with a heavy predominance of instinctive-moving centre. The Monk is an exaggerated No. 2 man with
the emotional centre developed and the others under-developed. The Yogi is an exaggerated No. 3 man with the intellectual centre developed and the others not sufficiently developed. If only these three traditional ways existed, there would be nothing for us, for we are too over-educated for these ways. But there is a Fourth Way which is a special way, not a combination of the other three. It is different from others first of all in that there is no external giving up of things, for all the work is inner. A man must begin work in the same conditions in which he finds himself when he meets it, because these conditions are the best for him. If he begins to work and study in these conditions, he can attain something, and later, if it is necessary, he will be able to change them, but not before he sees the necessity for it. So at first one continues to live the same life as before, in the same circumstances as before. In many respects this way proves more difficult than the others, for nothing is harder than to change oneself internally without changing externally. Then in the Fourth Way the first principle is that man must not believe anything; he must learn; so faith does not enter into the Fourth Way. One must not believe what one hears or what one is advised, one must find proofs for everything. If one is convinced that something is true, then one can believe it, but not before. This is a brief outline of the difference between the four ways. Q. Why is it wrong to believe? A. People believe or disbelieve when they are too lazy to think. You have to choose, you have to be convinced. You are told that you must remember yourself, but it would be wrong for you to remember yourself because you are told. First you must realize that you do not remember yourself and what it means, and then if you really realize that you need it and would like to remember yourself, you will do it in the right way. If you do it simply by copying somebody, you will do it in a wrong way. You must realize that you are doing it for yourself, not because somebody told you. Q. Is the Fourth Way for any special type of man? A. Yes, if you like—for a type of man who cannot follow the other ways. Q. Does it take much longer? A. It can be the shortest of all, because more knowledge enters into it. The Fourth Way is sometimes called the way of the 'sly man'. The sly man knows about the three traditional ways, but he also knows more than they do. Suppose people in all the ways work to get into a certain state necessary for some particular work they have to do. The sly man will produce this state in the shortest time of all; but he must know how to do it, he must know the secret. Q. What is the special meaning attached to the words 'sly man'? A. What do you understand by slyness?
Q. Indirectness. A. Yes, many things one cannot get direct. This idea is very largely used in the New Testament, only it is not called being 'sly'. There are situations that are so difficult that one cannot go straight, it is necessary to be 'sly'. Q. Can anybody go by the Fourth Way? A. No, because it needs understanding and efforts. One must be prepared for making efforts. Q. How can anybody tell whether he has got the right way for him? A. By results. You meet a system and begin to work. After some time you must be able to say what you have got from it. It is not very difficult. Certainly in most cases it will look at first like intellectual acquisitions, for you acquire new ideas, new knowledge. But it is so arranged that acquiring new ideas in the system is connected with a certain change in understanding, in attention, in will and so on. One cannot get new ideas in a right way without a certain change. Q. If the four ways are ways towards the same objective, what is the factor, or main quality, common to them all? A. What is similar in all the ways is the possibility of changing being. If you think of all that makes up being, such as wrong work of centres, identification, considering, negative emotions, absence of unity and so on, you will understand that all this can be changed in each of the four ways: in the way of the Fakir by conquering physical suffering, in the way of the Monk by creating religious emotion, in the way of the Yogi by acquiring knowledge and working on consciousness. Ways are the same, but people are different; a man who can go by one way cannot go by another. There are four definite categories of people in our times according to which the ways are divided. I do not mean that it has always been so, but it is definitely so now. This division is connected not so much with people being No. 1, 2 or 3 as with there being one-centre people, two-centre people, three-centre people, four-centre people. This means people in whom one centre is fully developed while the others are underdeveloped, or two centres developed and the others not developed, or three centres developed and the fourth under-developed, or four centres developed more or less equally. This makes the division into four ways. Q. Is this system the Fourth Way? A. This is a wrong formulation. You can ask yourself: 'Does this system belong to the way of the Fakir, the way of the Monk, or the way of the Yogi? No, but it may belong to the Fourth Way.' You cannot say this system is the Fourth Way; the Fourth Way is very big, and this system is very small by comparison. Q. Is it only in relation to schools that magnetic centre operates? A. In the religious way a different magnetic centre is necessary. A magnetic centre that brings one to a Yogi school or a monastery is different from the magnetic centre that brings one even to a group that
may possibly lead to a Fourth Way school. With that kind of magnetic centre one would not be able to work here: people would not have enough initiative. In the religious way they must obey. In this way people must have broader minds, they must understand. In Yogi schools and the religious way one can go on for a long time without understanding, just doing what one is told. Here, results are proportionate to understanding. Q. The magnetic centre of different people may be attracted by different ideas? Is the starting-point connected with that? A. Yes, it may be very different, but in relation to this system there must be a certain similarity of magnetic centres, so that people can work together; because in a certain period, class and education, people have more or less the same material. Q. Does the Fourth Way embrace the three other ways? A. No, this is a wrong description, because the Fourth Way does not have many of the things which enter into the first three ways, and it has many other things that do not enter into the three ways. The idea of the Fourth Way is that it discards from the three ways all that is unnecessary in them, because besides the necessary things the three ways have other things which have remained there purely through tradition, imitation and so on. In the Fourth Way all the sides that can develop, develop at the same time, and this makes it different from other ways where you first develop one side and then go back and develop another, then again go back and develop a third side. In the Fourth Way all the four centres must be more or less alive, on the surface, open to receive impressions, otherwise long preliminary work to open them is necessary before one can begin. Q. Is not the Fourth Way actually very much the most difficult, owing to the continual choice entailed under conditions of maximum outside distractions? A. It depends what you call most difficult. The other three ways need a very big decision right at the beginning, when you really know nothing. You have to renounce everything absolutely. If you can do that, and if you have other qualities that are needed, you can go by the way of the Monk, or the way of the Yogi, if you can find a Monk or a Yogi school. But if you do not know such schools and if you find that you cannot give up even small things, then certainly this is the only way possible for you. It is not a question of more or less difficult; it is a question of which is most possible. Then, if you think, you will find that there is only one way that is possible. Q. Is there anything in the schools of the Fourth Way equal to prayer state, and if so, does it come with self-remembering? A. Yes, in all the ways one has to pass through the same experiences, only in a different order. Certainly self-remembering, non-identifying and several other practices will give exactly the same personal sensations as high emotions of a religious or an intellectual order. You remember that
man was compared to a house with four rooms. What does development mean? It means working in the four rooms, only the order of rooms in which a man works is different in different ways. In the Fourth Way work is done in all the four rooms at once. Q. Is this organization a school? A. This is an interesting question: can we call ourselves a school? To a certain extent we may, because we acquire a certain knowledge and at the same time we learn how to change our being. But I must say in relation to this that in the beginning of our work, in St. Petersburg in 1916, we were made to understand that a school, in the full sense of the term, must consist of two degrees, that is, it must have two levels in it: one level, where men 1, 2 and 3 learn to become No. 4 and the other level where men No. 4 learn to become No. 5. If a school has two levels, it has more possibilities, because a double organization of this kind can give a larger variety of experience and make the work more quick and more sure. So, although in a certain sense we can call ourselves a school, it is better to use this term for a bigger organization. Q. Did I understand from what you said that this is not exactly a school? A. For some people it may be a school, for others not. It is always like that. It cannot be definite and cannot be the same for everybody. Q. If it is not yet ready to be called a school, what can make it so? A. Only work of its members on their own being, understanding of the principles of school work and discipline of a certain very definite kind. If we want to create a school, because we have come to the conclusion that we cannot change by ourselves without it, we must take part in the building of the school. This is the method of the Fourth Way. In the religious way schools already exist, but here, if we want a school, we must take part in the building of it. But first you must learn. When you know enough, you will know what to do. Q. You said that one can learn how to escape only from those who have escaped before? A. Quite right—in the allegory of prison. And this means a school can only start from another school. This system can have value only if it comes from higher mind. If we have reason to believe that it only comes from an ordinary mind, like ours, it can have no value and we cannot expect anything from it. Then better sit down and write your own system. Q. Would it be possible for everyone in a school to progress from No. 4 to No. 5, or only for a few? A. There is no limitation in principle. But you must understand that there is an enormous difference between man No. 4 and man No. 5. Man No. 4 is a man who has acquired a permanent centre of gravity, but in everything else he is an ordinary man. Man No. 5 is very different. He already has unity, a permanent 'I', the third state of consciousness. This means that he is awake, he can always remember himself when he needs it and