I never had much interest in the spiritual scene.
At some point a friend told me about this book, calling it something like the origin point of the whole spiritual movement. The title, In Search of the Miraculous, caught my attention too, so I picked up a used copy.
It sat on my shelf for years, but money got tight and I decided to sell it off. Before letting it go, though, it felt like a waste not to actually read it first.
The book is a compilation by a journalist named Ouspensky, recounting stories about a mystic named Gurdjieff. Since accounts of great figures are often written as biography rather than by the person themselves, I felt like this structure played a part in amplifying Gurdjieff's air of mystery.
The earliest point in the timeline the book covers is 1914. The author, Ouspensky, had been traveling through the East. He then returned to Russia and apparently spoke about his experiences there. In [19]15 he met Gurdjieff, who had also encountered mystical phenomena in the East and seemed to talk about similar things.
What struck me up to this point was the idea that, as the Industrial Revolution took hold in the West and mechanical things rapidly filled everyday life, people may have started projecting a kind of magical fantasy onto whatever innate power humans were imagined to possess. Living in Japan in 2023, I see something similar in how movies and manga depict the deep Amazon as a place full of people with superhuman physical abilities or mysterious rituals — and I wondered whether that same impulse got amplified in an era when getting information about the rest of the world was so much harder.
I couldn't make heads or tails of the ideas and reasoning Gurdjieff lays out in this book. There's a concept of an "astral body," and at one point he tries to unravel something by mapping the do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do scale onto the cosmos.
Gurdjieff repeatedly used the word "science" throughout his teachings. It made me think that, in the early 20th century, ordinary people in the West were probably vaguely believing in things we'd now call pseudoscience.
Among Gurdjieff's ideas was also something about a path to immortality. It struck me that people once sought this kind of thing — a way to extend the body's capacities and rise to a higher form of existence — through austerity, meditation, or plants, and that as technology advanced, that search shifted toward science and pharmaceuticals instead. And these days, I suspect computing has become the new vehicle for that same pursuit.
Gurdjieff's methods for cultivating an aura of mystery around himself were interesting too. He'd apparently set meeting times abruptly and at the last minute — sometimes even the same day — forcing people to cancel other plans, so that only those who happened to be nearby, by sheer luck, could attend. That scarcity gave his talks a sense of preciousness. Gurdjieff is said to have made remarks along the lines of "people don't appreciate what comes easily."
Overall, it left me thinking that the anxieties people carry — about status, death, sexuality, and everything else that comes with simply being alive — haven't really changed between then and now, and people keep seeking salvation in all sorts of places. It was also a good reminder that an air of mystique used to lead people can, in fact, be deliberately manufactured.