In listening to his audio recording of In Search of the Miraculous, I more than once recalled how in The Supreme Art of Dialogue, my friend A.G.E. Blake wrote: “‘Genius’ was originally understood as transpersonal intelligence that operated outside of conscious thought. The ‘humiliation’ of personalities can strengthen the play of genius. This is contrary to the populist view that genius is an amplification of self-expression; instead it can be understood as an act of submission.” (34)

I praise the recording (a link to Audible is at the bottom of this page), chiefly because it is a sustained act of submission, allowing something outside of his ordinary thought to manifest. That is, Blake has served the book with his reading, for the human dimension of this most remarkable text emerged for me together with the intellectual contents. Even that, however, is to suggest an artificial dichotomy between the intellectual and the human.

There is a certain trick of the eye: we see the words on a printed page, and we relate to them – we must. We relate to their meaning, and that is only right: each “molecule of meaning” to use another AGEBlakean phrase, has to be given its weight. But there was a person, more or less human, standing behind those words; in this case at least, Ouspensky did not just wish to write the words, he wanted to speak them, to deliver them; and this, in my view, is what Blake has served and conveyed through his reading, at once subtle and generous in its expression of Ouspensky’s humanity.

I have earlier suggested that the true genre of Miraculous is an apologia, a defence of his leaving Gurdjieff. Ouspensky had already included some of Gurdjieff’s ideas in the English edition of Tertium Organum, and had given permission for the production and publication of what would be The Fourth Way. He put something of his soul into the book, and it comes through in this reading. At every page, Ouspensky is asking, “Do you see what I mean? Do you grasp why? How I felt?”

There are other recordings of this book, and some of them are good, but there is, I venture to say, genius in this achievement. Finally, the impression is rather intangible, but my impression is that Blake’s reading reflects his own inner understanding – and that, I think, explains why there were a number of things which I became aware of for the first time – things I had not realised were in the books, and several matters the significance of which had gone over my head.

https://www.audible.com.au/pd/In-Search-of-the-Miraculous-Complete-with-Diagrams-Audiobook/B0DRDS3JC5?ref_pageloadid=Xmi9y5CNAGWtp5W2&pf_rd_p=74d71ce1-f90f-405f-b4c3-d38cdc1d6ae4&pf_rd_r=ZJ9XDE5FEXRXCSHM71P8&plink=UNM4xq5ZgiX2Xbfv&pageLoadId=6jb1gSqoWxXTpcCf&creativeId=fe6a2eac-22fe-4408-a458-f4442a0692b9&ref=a_library_t_c5_libItem_B0DRDS3JC5