One day in the office of the newspaper I found, while preparing for the next issue, a notice (in, I think, The Voice of Moscow) referring to the scenario of a ballet, “The Struggle of the Magicians,” which belonged, as it said, to a certain “Hindu.” The action of the ballet was to take place in India and give a complete picture of Oriental magic including fakir MIRACLES, sacred dances, and so on. I did not like the excessively jaunty tone of the paragraph, but as Hindu writers of ballet scenarios were, to a certain extent, rare in Moscow, I cut it out and put it into my paper, with the slight addition that there would be everything in the ballet that cannot be found in real India but which travelers go there to see. Fragments: One

Ladies who suddenly see “eyes” in their rooms which float in the air and fascinate them and which they follow from street to street and at the end arrive at the house of a certain Oriental to whom the eyes belong. Or people who, in the presence of the same Oriental, suddenly feel he is looking right through them, seeing all their feelings, thoughts, and desires; and they have a strange sensation in their legs and cannot move, and then fall into his power to such an extent that he can make them do everything he desires, even from a distance. All this and many other stories of the same sort had always seemed to me to be simply bad fiction. People invent MIRACLES for themselves and invent exactly what is expected from them. It is a mixture of superstition, self-suggestion, and defective thinking, and, according to myobservation, these stories never appear without a certain collaboration on the part of the men to whom they refer. Fragments: One

I was again thinking of “MIRACLES.” Fragments: One

I was particularly attracted by his sense of humor and the complete absence of any pretensions to “sanctity” or to the possession of “miraculous” powers, although, as we became convinced later, he possessed then the knowledge and ability of creating unusual phenomena of a psychological character. But he always laughed at people who expected MIRACLES from him. Fragments: Two

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

When G. went to Moscow our permanent group met without him. There remain in my memory several talks in our group which were connected with what we had recently heard from G. We had many talks about the idea of MIRACLES, and about the fact that the Absolute cannot manifest its will in our world and that this will manifests itself only in the form of mechanical laws and cannot manifest itself by violating these laws. Fragments: Five

“This means that the center has become connected directly to the large accumulator. The large accumulator contains an enormous amount of energy. Connected with the large accumulator a man is literally able to perform MIRACLES. But of course, if the ‘rolls’ continue to turn and energy which is made from air, food, and impressions continues to pour out of the large accumulator faster than it pours in, then there comes a moment when the large accumulator is drained of all energy and the organism dies. But this happens very seldom. Usually the organism automatically stops working long before this. Special conditions are necessary to cause the organism to die exhausted of all its energy. In ordinary conditions a man will fall asleep or he will faint or he will develop some internal complication which will stop the work a long time before the real danger. Fragments: Eleven

“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