This explanation interested me very much because I had never before heard or read an explanation quite like this. In all the attempts to explain “fakirs’ MIRACLEs” that I had come across, whether the “MIRACLEs” were explained as tricks or otherwise, it was always assumed that the performer knew what he was doing and how he did it, and that, if he did not speak of it, it was because he did not want to or was afraid. In the present instance the position was quite different. G.’s explanation seemed to me not only probable but, I dare say, the only one possible. The fakir himself did not know how he worked his “MIRACLE,” and, of course, could not have explained it. Fragments: Three

“The idea of a MIRACLE in the sense of a violation of laws by the will which made them is not only contrary to common sense but to the very idea of will itself. A ‘MIRACLE’ can only be a manifestation of laws which are unknown to men or rarely met with. A ‘MIRACLE’ is the manifestation in this world of the laws of another world. Fragments: Five

I was struck by the difference between the understanding of the people who belonged to our groups and that of people outside them. The people who belonged to our groups understood, though not all at once, that we had come into contact with a “MIRACLE,” and that it was something “new,” something that had never existed anywhere before. Fragments: Seven

“3. in its relation to a lower, or a smaller cosmos, “The manifestation of the laws of one cosmos in another cosmos constitutes what we call a MIRACLE. There can be no other kind of MIRACLE. A MIRACLE is not a breaking of laws, nor is it a phenomenon outside laws. Fragments: Ten

And with this the MIRACLE began. Fragments: Thirteen

BY THIS time, that is, by November, 1916, the position of affairs in Russia had begun to assume a very gloomy aspect. Up to this time we, at any rate most of us, had by some MIRACLE kept clear of “events.” Now “events” were drawing nearer to us, that is to say, they were drawing nearer to each one of us personally, and we could no longer fail to notice them. Fragments: Sixteen

“But is it not possible for man to be at once transposed to another stage of being by a wave of emotion?” someone asked. “I do not know,” said G., “we are again talking in different languages. A wave of emotion is indispensable, but it cannot change moving habits; it cannot of itself make centers work rightly which all their lives have been working wrongly. To change and repair this demands separate, special, and lengthy work. Then you say; transpose a man to another level of being. But from this point of view a man does not exist for me. There is a complex mechanism consisting of a whole series of complex parts. ‘A wave of emotion’ ‘takes place in one part but the other parts may not be affected by it at all. No MIRACLEs are possible in a machine. It is MIRACLE enough that a machine is able to change. But you want all laws to be violated.” Fragments: Seventeen