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In the spirit of scientific collaboration, if you're a computer
programmer, (and I had been employed by Dartmouth College's Kiewit
Computation Center and later, by IBM at their Philadelphia Datacenter,)
and you're reading the published account of a Russian mathematician,
you tend to take their working tenets or doctrines at face value.
If they're wrong, you can discount their theories later. Thus, within
two pages of In Search of the Miraculous, Peter Demianovich
Ouspensky establishes that as a child he had observed the world
is filled with obvious absurdities and contradictions, that as an
adult, prior to 1914, he had become convinced that "beyond
the thin film of false reality there exists another reality from
which, for some reason, something separates us," and he had
in fact gone off to India in search of schools or a school, which
he knew for a fact, existed. He had concluded, and this was only
the 2nd page of his book, "that personal, individual efforts
where insufficient and that it was necessary to come into touch
with the real and living thought which must be in existence somewhere
but with which we had lost contact."
Then he goes on to describe the sort of backhanded way he failed
to find a convincing school in India, returned to Moscow, where
he discovered his teacher, Georges Gurdjieff, through publicity
in a newspaper for some bizarre ballet called, "The Struggle
of the Magicians," with Gurdjieff pretending to be a Hindu
or something.
By now, the part of me I later learned to call Higher Intellectual
Center, had begun to vibrate.
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