Beelzebubs-Tales-to-His-Grandson-by-G-I-Gurdjieff

to think intensely, and even, as might be said, to "experience" all the materialrequired for eight thick volumes, as not for nothing is it stated in that branchof genuine science called the "laws of association of human mentation," whichhas come down from very ancient times and is known to only a fewcontemporary people, that "the sensation of the flow of time is directlyproportional to the quality and quantity of the flow of thoughts"—well then,while I was reading that first chapter, which, as I said, I had thought aboutdeeply from every aspect and "experienced" almost exclusively under theaction of my voluntary self-mortification, and which, moreover, I had writtenat a time when the functioning of my entire whole—a functioning thatengenders in a man what is called the "power to manifest himself by his owninitiative"—was utterly disharmonized, that is, when I was still extremely illfrom the effects of an accident that had occurred to me not long before,consisting in a "charge and crash" of my automobile at full speed into a treestanding silently, like an observer and reckoner of the disorderly passage ofcenturies, on the historic road between the world capital of Paris and the townof Fontainebleau—a "charge" which, according to any sane humanunderstanding, should have put an end to my life—well then, from readingthat chapter there arose in me a quite definite decision.Recalling my state during the writing of that first chapter, I cannot helpadding here—owing to a small weakness of mine that always causes me toexperience an inner satisfaction whenever I see on the faces of our estimablecontemporary "representatives of exact science" that very specific smile,peculiar to them alone—that although, after this accident, my body was sobattered and "everything in it so disordered" that for months it presented ageneral picture which might be described as "a piece of live meat in a cleanbed," my correctly disciplined "spirit," as it would usually be called, despitethe physical state of my body, was not in