“Sensation and emotion do not reason, do not compare, they simply define a given impression by its aspect, by its being pleasant or unpleasant in one sense or another, by its color, taste, or smell. Moreover, SENSATIONs can be indifferent — neither warm nor cold, neither pleasant nor unpleasant: ‘white paper,’ ‘red pencil.’ In the SENSATION of white or red there is nothing either pleasant or unpleasant. At any rate there need not necessarily be anything pleasant or unpleasant connected with this or that color. These SENSATIONs, the so-called ‘five senses,’ and others, like the feeling of warmth, cold, and so on, are instinctive. Feeling functions or emotions are always pleasant or unpleasant; indifferent emotions do not exist. Fragments: Six

“Man has no permanent and unchangeable I. Every thought, every mood, every desire, every SENSATION, says ‘I.’ And in each case it seems to be taken for granted that this I belongs to the Whole, to the whole man, and that a thought, a desire, or an aversion is expressed by this Whole. In actual fact there is no foundation whatever for this assumption. Man’s every thought and desire appears and lives quite separately and independently of the Whole. And the Whole never expresses itself, for the simple reason that it exists, as such, only physically as a thing, and in the abstract as a concept. Man has no individual I. But there are, instead, hundreds and thousands of separate small I’s, very often entirely unknown to one another, never coming into contact, or, on the contrary, hostile to each other, mutually exclusive and incompatible. Each minute, each moment, man is saying or thinking ‘I.’ And each time his I is different. Just now it was a thought, now it is a desire, now a SENSATION, now another thought, and so on, endlessly. Man is a plurality. Man’s name is legion. Fragments: Three

“The teaching of the three forces is at the root of all ancient systems. The first force may be called active or positive; the second, passive or negative; the third, neutralizing. But these are merely names, for in reality all three forces are equally active and appear as active, passive, and neutralizing, only at their meeting points, that is to say, only in relation to one another at a given moment. The first two forces are more or less comprehensible to man and the third may sometimes be discovered either at the point of application of the forces, or in the ‘medium,’ or in the ‘result.’ But, speaking in general, the third force is not easily accessible to direct observation and understanding. The reason for this is to be found in the functional limitations of man’s ordinary psychological activity and in the fundamental categories of our perception of the phenomenal world, that is, in our SENSATION of space and time resulting from these limitations. People cannot perceive and observe the third force directly any more than they can spatially perceive the ‘fourth dimension.’ Fragments: Four

“But to learn the methods of self-observation and of right self-study requires a certain understanding of the functions and the characteristics of the human machine. Thus in observing the functions of the human machine it is necessary to understand the correct divisions of the functions observed and to be able to define them exactly and at once; and the definition must not be a verbal but an inner definition; by taste, by SENSATION, in the same way as we define all inner experiences. Fragments: Six

“Some people find it difficult to understand the difference between thought and feeling, others have difficulty in understanding the difference between feeling and SENSATION, between a thought and a moving impulse. Fragments: Six

“The difficulty of distinguishing between the functions is increased by the fact that people differ very much in the way they feel their functions. This is what we do not generally understand. We take people to be much more alike than they really are. In reality, however, there exist between them great differences in the forms and methods of their perception. Some perceive chiefly through their mind, others through their feeling, and others through SENSATION. It is very difficult, almost impossible for men of different categories and of different modes of perception to understand one another, because they call one and the same thing by different names, and they call different things by the same name. Besides this, various other combinations are possible. One man perceives by thoughts and SENSATIONs, another by thoughts and feelings, and so on. One or another mode of perception is immediately connected with one or another kind of reaction to external events. The result of this difference in perception and reaction to external events is expressed in the first place by the fact that people do not understand one another and in the second by the fact that they do not understand themselves. Very often a man calls his thoughts or his intellectual perceptions his feelings, calls his feelings his thoughts, and his SENSATIONs his feelings. This last is the most common. If two people perceive the same thing differently, let us say that one perceives it through feeling and another through SENSATION — they may argue all their lives and never understand in what consists the difference of their attitude to a given object. Actually, one sees one aspect of it, and the other a different aspect. Fragments: Six

“At the same time as we watch the work of the centers we shall observe, side by side with their right working, their wrong working, that is, the working of one center for another; the attempts of the thinking center to feel or to pretend that it feels, the attempts of the emotional center to think, the attempts of the moving center to think and feel. As has been said already, one center working for another is useful in certain cases, for it preserves the continuity of mental activity. But in becoming habitual it becomes at the same time harmful, since it begins to interfere with right working by enabling each center to shirk its own direct duties and to do, not what it ought to be doing, but what it likes best at the moment. In a normal healthy man each center does its own work, that is, the work for which it was specially destined and which it can best perform. There are situations in life which the thinking center alone can deal with and can find a way out of. If at this moment the emotional center begins to work instead, it will make a muddle of everything and the result of its interference will be most unsatisfactory. In an ‘unbalanced kind of man the substitution of one center for another goes on almost continually and this is precisely what ‘being unbalanced’ or ‘neurotic’ means. Each center strives, as it were, to pass its work on to another, and, at the same time, it strives to do the work of another center for which it is not fitted. The emotional center working for the thinking center brings unnecessary nervousness, feverishness, and hurry into situations where, on the contrary, calm judgment and deliberation are essential. The thinking center working for the emotional center brings deliberation into situations which require quick decisions and makes a man incapable of distinguishing the peculiarities and the fine points of the position. Thought is too slow. It works out a certain plan of action and continues to follow it even though the circumstances have changed and quite a different course of action is necessary. Besides, in some cases the interference of the thinking center gives rise to entirely wrong reactions, because the thinking center is simply incapable of understanding the shades and distinctions of many events. Events that are quite different for the moving center and for the emotional center appear to be alike to it. Its decisions are much too general and do not correspond to the decisions which the emotional center would have made. This becomes perfectly clear if we imagine the interference of thought, that is, of the theoretical mind, in the domain of feeling, or of SENSATION, or of movement; in all three cases the interference of the mind leads to wholly undesirable results. The mind cannot understand shades of feeling. We shall see this clearly if we imagine one man reasoning about the emotions of another. He is not feeling anything himself so the feelings of another do not exist for him. A full man does not understand a hungry one. But for the other they have a very definite existence. And the decisions of the first, that is of the mind, can never satisfy him. In exactly the same way the mind cannot appreciate SENSATIONs. For it they are dead. Nor is it capable of controlling movement. Instances of this kind are the easiest to find. Whatever work a man may be doing, it is enough for him to try to do each action deliberately, with his mind, following every movement, and he will see that the quality of his work will change immediately. If he is typing, his fingers, controlled by his moving center, find the necessary letters themselves, but if he tries to ask himself before every letter: ‘Where is “k”?’ ‘Where is the comma?’ ‘How is this word spelled?’ he at once begins to make mistakes or to write very slowly. If one drives a car with the help of one’s mind, one can go only in the lowest gear. The mind cannot keep pace with all the movements necessary for developing a greater speed. To drive at full speed, especially in the streets of a large town, while steering with the help of one’s mind is absolutely impossible for an ordinary man. Fragments: Six

“Your principal mistake consists in thinking that you always have consciousness, and in general, either that consciousness is always present or that it is never present. In reality consciousness is a property which is continually changing. Now it is present, now it is not present. And there are different degrees and different levels of consciousness. Both consciousness and the different degrees of consciousness must be understood in oneself by SENSATION, by taste. No definitions can help you in this case and no definitions are possible so long as you do not understand what you have to define. And science and philosophy cannot define consciousness because they want to define it where it does not exist. It is necessary to distinguish consciousness from the possibility of consciousness. We have-only the possibility of consciousness and rare flashes of it. Therefore we cannot define what consciousness is.” Fragments: Seven

And secondly I realized that moments of self-remembering do occur in life, although rarely. Only the deliberate production of these moments created the SENSATION of novelty. Actually I had been familiar with them from early childhood. They came either in new and unexpected surroundings, in a new place, among new people while traveling, for instance, when suddenly one looks about one and says: How strange! I and in this place; or in very emotional moments, in moments of danger, in moments when it is necessary to keep one’s head, when one hears one’s own voice and sees and observes oneself from the outside. Fragments: Seven

Two hours later I woke up in the Tavricheskaya, that is, far away. I was going by izvostchik to the printers. The SENSATION of awakening was extraordinarily vivid. I can almost say that I came to. I remembered everything at once. How I had been walking along the Nadejdinskaya, how I had been remembering myself, how I had thought about cigarettes, and how at this thought I seemed all at once to fall and disappear into a deep sleep. Fragments: Seven

“In order to understand what the difference between states of consciousness is, let us return to the first state of consciousness which is sleep. This is an entirely subjective state of consciousness. A man is immersed in dreams, whether he remembers them or not does not matter. Even if some real impressions reach him, such as sounds, voices, warmth, cold, the SENSATION of his own body, they arouse in him only fantastic subjective images. Then a man wakes up. At first glance this is a quite different state of consciousness. He can move, he can talk with other people, he can make calculations ahead, he can see danger and avoid it, and so on. It stands to reason that he is in a better position than when he was asleep. But if we go a little more deeply into things, if we take a look into his inner world, into his thoughts, into the causes of his actions, we shall see that he is in almost the same state as when he is asleep. And it is even worse, because in sleep he is passive, that is, he cannot do anything. In the waking state, however, he can do something all the time and the results of all his actions will be reflected upon him or upon those around him. And yet he does not remember himself. He is a machine, everything with him happens. He cannot stop the flow of his thoughts, he cannot control his imagination, his emotions, his attention. He lives in a subjective world of ‘I love,’ ‘I do not love,’ ‘I like,’ ‘I do not like,’ ‘I want,’ ‘I do not want,’ that is, of what he thinks he likes, of what he thinks he does not like, of what he thinks he wants, of what he thinks he does not want. He does not see the real world. The real world is hidden from him by the wall of imagination. He lives in sleep. He is asleep. What is called ‘clear consciousness’ is sleep and a far more dangerous sleep than sleep at night in bed. Fragments: Eight

“‘Buffers’ are created slowly and gradually. Very many ‘buffers’ are created artificially through ‘education.’ Others are created under the hypnotic influence of all surrounding life. A man is surrounded by people who live, speak, think, and feel by means of ‘buffers.’ Imitating them in their opinions, actions, and words, a man involuntarily creates similar ‘buffers’ in himself. ‘Buffers’ make a man’s life more easy. It is very hard to live without ‘buffers.’ But they keep man from the possibility of inner development because ‘buffers’ are made to lessen shocks and it is only shocks that can lead a man out of the state in which he lives, that is, waken him. ‘Buffers’ lull a man to sleep, give him the agreeable and peaceful SENSATION that all will be well, that no contradictions exist and that he can sleep in peace. ‘Buffers’ are appliances by means of -which a man can always be in the right. ‘Buffers’ help a man not to feel his conscience. Fragments: Eight

Upon me personally the “table of hydrogens” produced a very strong impression which, later on, was to become still stronger. I felt in this “ladder reaching from earth to heaven” something very like the SENSATIONs of the world which came to me several years before during my strange experiments when I felt so strongly the connectedness, the wholeness, and the “mathematicalness” of everything in the world.1 This lecture, with different variations, was repeated many times, that is, either in connection with the explanation of the “ray of creation” or in connection with the explanation of the law of octaves. But in spite of the strange SENSATION it gave to me I was far from giving it its proper value the first times I heard it. And above all, I did not understand at once that these ideas are much more difficult to assimilate and are much deeper in their content than they appeared from their simple exposition. Fragments: Nine

“It has been explained before that in ordinary conditions of life we do not remember ourselves; we do not remember, that is, we do not feel ourselves, are not aware of ourselves at the moment of a perception, of an emotion, of a thought or of an action. If a man understands this and tries to remember himself, every impression he receives while remembering himself will, so to speak, be doubled. In an ordinary psychic state I simply look at a street. But if I remember myself, I do not simply look at the street; I feel that I am looking, as though saying to myself: ‘I am looking.’ Instead of one impression of the street there are two impressions, one of the street and another of myself looking at it. This second impression, produced by the fact of my remembering myself, is the ‘additional shock.’ Moreover, it very often happens that the additional SENSATION connected with self-remembering brings with it an element of emotion, that is, the work of the machine attracts a certain amount of ‘carbon’ 12 to the place in question. Efforts to remember oneself, observation of oneself at the moment of receiving an impression, observation of one’s impressions at the moment of receiving them, registering, so to speak, the reception of impressions and the simultaneous defining of the impressions received, all this taken together doubles the intensity of the impressions and carries do 48 to re 24. At the same time the effort connected with the transition of one note to another and the passage of 48 itself to 24 enables do 48 of the third octave to come into contact with mi 48 of the second octave and to give this note the requisite amount of energy necessary for the transition of mi to fa. In this way the ‘shock’ given to do 48 extends also to mi 48 and enables the second octave to develop. Fragments: Nine

“In the first place it must be noted that normally in the sex center as well as in the higher emotional and the higher thinking centers, there is no negative side. In all the other centers except the higher ones, in the thinking, in the emotional, in the moving, in the instinctive, in all of them there are, so to speak, two halves — the positive and the negative; affirmation and negation, or ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ in the thinking center, pleasant and unpleasant SENSATIONs in the moving and instinctive centers. There is no such division in the sex center. There are no positive and negative sides in it. There are no unpleasant SENSATIONs or unpleasant feelings in it; there is either a pleasant SENSATION, a pleasant feeling, or there is nothing, an absence of any SENSATION, complete indifference. But in consequence of the wrong workwork of centers it often happens that the sex center unites with the negative part of the emotional center or with the negative part of the instinctive center. And then, stimulation of a certain kind of the sex center, or even any stimulation at all of the sex center, calls forth unpleasant feelings and unpleasant SENSATIONs. People who experience unpleasant feelings and SENSATIONs which have been evoked in them through ideas and imagination connected with sex are inclined to regard them as a great virtue or as something original; in actual fact it is simply disease. Everything connected with sex should be either pleasant or indifferent. Unpleasant feelings and SENSATIONs all come from the emotional center or the instinctive center. Fragments: Twelve

Two or three days after G.’s departure I was walking along the Troitsky street and suddenly I saw that the man who was walking towards me was asleep. There could be no doubt whatever about this. Although his eyes were open, he was walking along obviously immersed in dreams which ran like clouds across his face. It entered my mind that if I could look at him long enough I should see his dreams, that is, I should understand what he was seeing in his dreams. But he passed on. After him came another also sleeping. A sleeping izvostchik went by with two sleeping passengers. Suddenly I found myself in the position of the prince in the “Sleeping Princess.” Everyone around me was asleep. It was an indubitable and distinct SENSATION. I realized what it meant that many things could be seen with our eyes which we do not usually see. These SENSATIONs lasted for several minutes. Then they were repeated very weakly on the following day. But I at once made the discovery that by trying to remember myself I was able to intensify and prolong these SENSATIONs for so long as I had energy enough not to be diverted, that is, not to allow things and everything around me to attract my attention. When attention was diverted I ceased to see “sleeping people” because I had obviously gone to sleep myself. I told only a few of our people of these experiments and two of them when they tried to remember themselves had similar experiences. Fragments: Thirteen

I felt so much in this word that for some time I did not hear myself what I was saying. But after I had collected my thoughts I saw that they were listening to me and that I had explained everything I had not understood myself on the way to the meeting. This gave me an extraordinarily strong and clear SENSATION as though I had discovered for myself new possibilities, a new method of perception and understanding by giving explanations to other people. And under the impetus of this SENSATION, as soon as I had said that examples or analogies of the transition of the forces 1, 2, 3 and 1, 3, 2 must be found in the real world, I at once saw these examples both in the human organism and in the astronomical world and in mechanics in the movements of waves. Fragments: Thirteen

I must mention here that personally I was entirely unable to evoke this SENSATION in myself and that I have to rely on others. Fragments: Fifteen

Very interesting was the exercise with a “circular SENSATION,” as G. called it. A man lies on his back on the floor. Trying to relax all his muscles, he then concentrates his attention on trying to sense his nose. When he begins to sense his nose the man then transfers his attention and tries to sense his ear; when this is achieved he transfers his attention to the right foot. From the right foot to the left; then to the left hand; then to the left ear and back again to the nose, and so on. Fragments: Seventeen

It became more and more difficult for me to breathe and to mark time, and to observe the count of breaths and steps. I was pouring with sweat, my head began to turn round, and I thought I should fall. I began to despair of obtaining results of any kind and I had almost stopped when suddenly something seemed to crack or move inside me and my breathing went on evenly and properly at the rate I wanted it to go, but without any effort on my part, while affording me all the amount of air I needed. It was an extraordinarily pleasant SENSATION. I shut my eyes and continued to mark time, breathing easily and freely and feeling exactly as though strength was increasing in me and that I was getting lighter and stronger. I thought that if I could continue to run in this way for a certain time I should get still more interesting results because waves of a sort of joyful trembling had already begun to go through my body which, as I knew from previous experiments, preceded what I called the opening of the inner consciousness. Fragments: Seventeen