Summing up the total of my impressions of the East and particularly of India, I had to admit that, on my return, my problem seemed even more difficult and complicated than on my departure. India and the East had not only not lost their glamour of the miraculous; on the contrary, this glamour had acquired new shades that were absent from it before. I saw clearly that something could be found there which had long since ceased to exist in Europe and I considered that the direction I had taken was the right one. But, at the same time, I was convinced that the SECRET was better and more deeplyhidden than I could previously have supposed. Fragments: One

“But if I Joined your group,” I said to G., “I should be faced with a verydifficult problem. I do not know whether you exact a promise from your pupils to keep SECRET what they learn from you, but I could give no such promise. There have been two occasions in my life when I had the possibilityof joining groups engaged in work which appears to be similar to yours, at any rate by description, and which interested me very much at the time. But in both cases to join would have meant consenting or promising to keep SECRET everything that I might learn there. And I refused in both cases, because, before everything else, I am a writer, and I desire to be absolutelyfree and to decide for myself what I shall write and what I shall not write. If I promise to keep SECRET something I am told, it would be very difficult afterwards to separate what had been told me from what came to my own mind either in connection with it or even with no connection. For instance, I know very little about your ideas yet, but I do know that when we begin to talk we shall very soon come to questions of time and space, of higher dimensions, and so on. These are questions on which I have already been working for many years. I have no doubt whatever that they roust occupy a large place in your system.” G. nodded. “Well, you see, if we were now to talk under a pledge of secrecy, then, after the first conversation I should not know what I could write and what I could not write.” Fragments: One

“I could accept such a condition only temporarily,” I said. “Of course it would be ludicrous if I began at once to write about what I learn from you. But if, in principle, you do not wish to make a SECRET of your ideas and care only that they should not be transmitted in a distorted form, then I could accept such a condition and wait until I had a better understanding of your teaching. I once came across a group of people who were engaged in various scientific experiments on a very wide scale. They made no SECRET of their work. But they made it a condition that no one would have the right to speak of or describe any experiment unless he was able to carry it out himself. Until he was able to repeat the experiment himself he had to keep silent.” Fragments: One

“For instance, take one point. A situation may arise, not, of course, in the beginning but later on, when a man has to preserve secrecy, even if only for a time, about something he has learned. But can a man who does not know himself promise to keep a SECRET? Of course he can promise to do so, but can he keep his promise? For he is not one, there are many different people in him. One in him promises, and believes that he wants to keep the SECRET. But tomorrow another in him will tell it to his wife, or to a friend over a bottle of wine, or a clever man may question him in such a way that he himself will not notice that he is letting out everything. Finally, he may be hypnotized, or he may be shouted at unexpectedly and frightened, and he will do anything you like. What sort of obligations can he take upon himself? No, with such a man we will not talk seriously. To be able to keep a SECRET a man must know himself and he must be. And a man such as all men are is very far from this. Fragments: One

“Sometimes we make temporary conditions with people as a test. Usuallythey are broken very soon but we never give any serious SECRET to a man we don’t trust so it does no matter much. I mean it matters nothing to us although it certainly breaks our connection with this man and he loses his chance to learn anything from us, if there is anything to learn from us. Also it may affect all his personal friends, although they may not expect it.” Fragments: One

“The fourth way is sometimes called the way of the sly man. The ‘sly man’ knows some SECRET which the fakir, monk, and yogi do not know. How the ‘sly man’ learned this SECRET — it is not known. Perhaps he found it in some old books, perhaps he inherited it, perhaps he bought it, perhaps he stole it from someone. It makes no difference. The ‘sly man’ knows the SECRET and with its help outstrips the fakir, the monk, and the yogi. Fragments: Two

“For this it is necessary ‘to be’ If a man is changing every minute, if there is nothing in him that can withstand external influences, it means that there is nothing in him that can withstand death. But if he becomes independent of external influences, if there appears in him something that can live by itself, this something may not die. In ordinary circumstances we die every moment. External influences change and we change with them, that is, many of our I’s die. If a man develops in himself a per­manent I that can survive a change in external conditions, it can survive the death of the physical body. The whole SECRET is that one cannot work for a future life without working for this one. In working for life a man works for death, or rather, for immortality. Therefore work for immortality, if one may so call it, cannot be separated from general work. In attaining the one, a man attains the other. A man may strive to be simply for the sake of his own life’s interests. Through this alone he may become immortal. We do not speak specially of a future life and we do not study whether it exists or not, because the laws are everywhere the same. In studying his own life as he knows it, and the lives of other men, from birth to death, a man is studying all the laws which govern life and death and immortality. If he becomes the master of his life, he may become the master of his death. Fragments: Six

“General conditions at the beginning of the work are usually of the following kind. First of all it is explained to all the members of a group that they must keep SECRET everything they hear or learn in the group and not only while they .are members of it but forever afterwards. Fragments: Eleven

“This is an indispensable condition whose idea should be clear to them from the very beginning. In other words, it should be clear to them that in this there is no attempt whatever to make a SECRET of what is not essentially a SECRET, neither is there any deliberate intention to deprive them of the right to exchange views with those near to them or with their friends. Fragments: Eleven

“You must realize that the teacher takes a very difficult task upon himself, the cleaning and the repair of human machines. Of course he accepts only those machines that are within his power to mend. If something essential is broken or put out of order in the machine, then he refuses to take it. But even such machines, which by their nature could still be cleaned, become quite hopeless if they begin to tell lies. A lie to the teacher, even the most insignificant, concealment of any kind such as the concealment of something another has asked to be kept SECRET, or of something the man himself has said to another, at once puts an end to the work of that man, especially if he has previously made any efforts. Fragments: Eleven

“We made everything a SECRET”; we failed to tell them what G. had spoken of in their absence. We told tales about them to G., trying to make him distrust them. We recounted to him all talks with them, leading him constantly into error by distorting all the facts and striving to present everything in a false light. We had given G. wrong impressions about them, making him see everything far from as it was. Fragments: Thirteen

“This symbol cannot be met with anywhere in the study of ‘occultism,’ either in books or in oral transmission. It was given such significance by those who knew, that they considered it necessary to keep the knowledge of it SECRET. Fragments: Fourteen

“The knowledge of the enneagram has for a very long time been preserved in SECRET and if it now is, so to speak, made available to all, it is only in an incomplete and theoretical form of which nobody could make any practical use without instruction from a man who knows. Fragments: Fourteen

“The Christian church, the Christian form of worship, was not invented by the fathers of the church. It was all taken in a ready-made form from Egypt, only not from the Egypt that we know but from one which we do not know. This Egypt was in the same place as the other but it existed much earlier. Only small bits of it survived in historical times, and these bits have been preserved in SECRET and so well that we do not even know where they have been preserved. Fragments: Fifteen

“You must understand,” he said, “that every real religion, that is, one that has been created by learned people for a definite aim, consists of two parts. One part teaches what is to be done. This part becomes common knowledge and in the course of time is distorted and departs from the original. The other part teaches how to do what the first part teaches. This part is preserved in SECRET in special schools and with its help it is always possible to rectify what has been distorted in the first part or to restore what has been forgotten. Fragments: Fifteen

“This SECRET part exists in Christianity also as well as in other religions and it teaches how to carry out the precepts of Christ and what they really mean.” Fragments: Fifteen

There, in February and March, 1915, I gave public lectures on my travels in India. The titles of these lectures were “In Search of the Miraculous” and “The Problems of Death.” In these lectures, which were to serve as an introduction to a book on my travels it was my intention to write, I said that in India the “miraculous” was not sought where it ought to be sought, that all ordinary ways were useless, and that India guarded her SECRETs better than many people supposed; but that the “miraculous” did exist there and was indicated by many things which people passed by without realizing their hidden sense and meaning or without knowing how to approach them. I again had “schools” in mind. Fragments: One