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Chapter One At this point, Ouspensky raised the very argument that was forming in my own mind: “Why of course not! ...Art, poetry, thought, are phenomena of quite a different order.” Gurdjieff replied: “Of exactly the same order. These activities are just as mechanical as everything else. Men are machines and nothing but mechanical actions can be expected of machines” wall! How dare he say such a terrible thing about human beings! How dare he deny the reality of the spirit, the sublimity of music and mysticism and the salvation of Christ! I’m surprised that sparks from my eyes didn’t set the bed on fire and steam didn’t issue from my ears. I was hot with outrage! But, it had been said. The seed of the thought had been planted in my mind. After awhile, my curiosity about such a concept came to the fore. I began to mull over the issue in an attempt to find ways to disprove it. I mused over my own life, all my interactions with other people, and gradually, I began to realize that there was, indeed, something mysteriously “mechanical” about the interactions between human beings. I thought about the many people I had worked with therapeutically using hypnosis, and how “mechanical” the therapy was, and how the roots of most of their problems were rather like I had worked with observations. Generally, it seemed, these perceptions “were erroneous, and it was the error of this “mechanical” thinking that created the But, over and over again I could see that such problems and the ways they formed and operated, as well as the therapeutic solutions themselves, were, essentially, mechanical. It was like a formula. With just a few “hints” from the person, I could almost immediately see the whole dynamic of their past and the formation of their problem, as well as the “mechanical” way to solve it. I applied the technique, and just like changing the wires and spark plugs in a car, it made them start “firing on all cylinders” again. Okay, so the guy has a point. But clearly, those people who were “saved” were saved from being mechanical, right? I wanted to find out if he had anything to say about that! I called one of my children to retrieve the book for me and I continued to read. The question was I was so enraged that I snapped the book shut and threw it against the “mechanical” and conditioned reactions to their perceptions and problems in the first place. asked: “Can it be said that man possesses immortality?”