"The struggle against the 'false I,' against one's chief feature or chief fault, is the
most important part of the work, and it must proceed in deeds, not in words. For this
purpose the teacher gives each man definite tasks which require, in order to carry them
out, the conquest of his chief feature. When a man carries out these tasks he struggles
with himself, works on himself. If he avoids the tasks, tries not to carry them out, it
means that either he does not want to or that he cannot work.
"As a rule only very easy tasks are given at the beginning which the teacher does
not even call tasks, and he does not say much about them but gives them in the form of
hints. If he sees that he is understood and that the tasks are carried out he passes on to
more and more difficult ones.
"More difficult tasks, although they are only subjectively difficult, are called
'barriers.' The peculiarity of barriers consists in the fact that, having surmounted a
serious barrier, a man can no longer return to ordinary sleep, to ordinary life. And if,
having passed the first barrier, he feels afraid of those that follow and does not go on,
he stops so to speak between two barriers and is unable to move either backwards or
forwards. This is the worst thing that can happen to a man. Therefore the teacher is
usually very careful in the choice of tasks and barriers, in other words, he takes the
risk of giving definite tasks requiring the conquest of inner barriers only to those
people who have already shown themselves sufficiently strong on small barriers.
"It often happens that, having stopped before some barrier, usually the smallest and
the most simple, people turn against the work, against the teacher, and against other
members of the group, and accuse them of the very thing that is becoming revealed to
them in themselves.
"Sometimes they repent later and blame themselves, then they again blame others,
then they repent once more, and so on. But there is nothing that shows up a man better
than his attitude towards the work and the teacher after he has left it. ...
"But this is not the chief thing; the chief thing is his own personal attitude, his own
valuation of the ideas which he receives or has received, and his keeping or losing this
valuation. A man may think for a long time and quite sincerely that he wants to work
and even make great efforts, and then he may throw up everything and even definitely
go against the work; justify himself, invent various fabrications, deliberately ascribe a wrong meaning to what he has heard, and so on."
...
"You know nothing in yourself," G. told him; "if you knew you would not have that
feature. And people certainly see you in the way I told you. But you do not see how
they see you. If you accept what I told you as your chief feature you will understand
how people see you. And if you find a way to struggle with this feature and to destroy
it, that is, to destroy its involuntary manifestation" (G. emphasized these words), "you
will produce on people not the impression that you do now but any impression you
like."
...
He said to another that his chief feature was a tendency always to argue with
everybody about everything.
"But then I never argue," the man very heatedly at once replied.
Nobody could help laughing.
G. told another of our party—it was the middle-aged man on whom he had carried
out the experiment of dividing personality from essence and who asked for raspberry
jam—that his feature was that he had no conscience.
The following day the man came and said that he had been in the public library and
had looked through the encyclopedic dictionaries of four languages for the meaning of
the word "conscience."
G. merely waved his hand.
To the other man, his companion in the experiment, G. said that he had no shame,
and he at once cracked a rather amusing joke against himself.
