"Colin Wilson - The War Against Sleep" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Colin)

was not his native language, he could speak
Russian fluently, in a manner not quite like ours,
more exact and very picturesque. Sometimes he
would speak in a 'lazy' voice, and you felt that
each phrase was being carefully and specially
 put together, for that particular occasion, not at all
like the ready-m ade phrases which we would
normally use in conversation, devoid of creative
power or individuality. You quickly grasped that
he had a gift of assembling words expressively.
And here I sat, and I felt that I was at last in the
presence of a Guru.

Gurdjieff made the same kind of impression on everyone who
met him. W e have, perhaps, a dozen records by pupils
describing their first meeting. Almost without exception, they
mention that 'look that pierced right through you'. A young army
officer named Thomas de Hartmann met Gurdjieff at about the
same time. W hen two men wearing black coats and black
moustaches approached him in the caf├й, he wondered which
was Gurdjieff. 'But my uncertainty was quickly dispelled by the
eyes of one of the men'. J. G. Bennett, who met Gurdjieff in
Constantinople in 1920, wrote: 'I met the strangest pair of eyes
I have ever seen. The two eyes were so different that I wondered
if the light had played some trick on me.' And all these different
impressions are summarized in a remark made by the wife of the
physician Kenneth W alker after she met Gurdjieff in Paris in
1948: 'The chief impression he gave me was the impression of
immense vigour and of concentrated strength. I had the feeling
that he was not really a m an but a magician.'

Gurdjieff was, in fact, a kind of magician. There can be no doubt
that he possessed certain magical or psychic powers. But he
seems to have regarded these as irrelevant or unimportant.
Gurdjieff's central concern was with the potentialities of human
beings тАФ or, more specifically, of human consciousness.
Ouspensky expressed it clearly in a little book called The
Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution, where he remarks that
ordinary psychology is concerned with man as he actually exists.
But there is another kind, that studies man 'not from the point of
view of what he is, or what he seems to be, but from the point of
view of what he may become; that is, from the point of view of his
possible evolution.'
Expressed in this way, the idea sounds vague and general. But
Gurdjieff's approach was precise and particular. The writings of
his pupils тАФ or disciples тАФ contains many accounts of the
operation of his own remarkable powers. Fritz Peters, an
American who had known Gurdjieff since childhood, describes
what happened when he visited Gurdjieff in Paris immediately
after the Second W orld War. His war experiences had brought