All excerpts taken from the book
In search of the miraculous by P.D. Ouspensky.
Published by Arkana - Penguin Books

A very important moment in the work on oneself is when a man begins to distinguish his personality and his essence.
A man's real I, his individuality, can grow only from his essence. It can be said that a man's individuality is his essence, grown up, mature.
But in order to enable essence to grow up, it is first of all necessary to weaken the constant pressure of personality upon it, because the obstacles to the growth of essence are contained in personality.

Certain teachings compare man to a house of four rooms.
Man lives in one room, the smallest and poorest of all, and until he is told of it, he does not suspect the existence of the other rooms which are full of treasures.
When he does learn of this he begins to seek the keys to these rooms and especially the fourth, the most important, room.
And when a man has found his way into this room he really becomes the master of his house, for only then does the house belong to him wholly and forever.

The crowd neither wants nor seeks knowledge, and the leaders of the crowd, in their own interests, try to strengthen its fear and dislike of everything new and unknown. The slavery in which mankind lives is based upon this fear.

One thing alone is certain, that man's slavery grows and increases.
Man is becoming a willing slave. He no longer needs chains.
He begins to grow fond of his slavery, to be proud of it.
And this is the most terrible thing that can happen to a man.

In order to do it is necessary to be.

There is no compulsory, mechanical evolution.
Evolution is the result of conscious struggle.

The evolution of man is the evolution of his consciousness, and 'consciousness' cannot evolve unconsciously.
The evolution of man is the evolution of his will, and 'will' cannot evolve involuntarily.
The evolution of man is the evolution of his power of doing, and 'doing' cannot be the result of things which 'happen'.

'Progress' and 'Civilization', in the real meaning of these words, can appear only as a result of conscious efforts. They cannot appear as the result of unconscious mechanical actions.

Of the desires expressed
the one which is most right
is the desire to be 'master of oneself',
because without this nothing else is possible.

Everything is dependent on everything else,
everything is connected, nothing is separate.
Therefore everything is going in the only way it can go.
If people were different everything would be different.
They are what they are, so everything is as it is.

The evolution of man can be taken as the development in him of those powers and possibilities which never develop by themselves, that is, mechanically.
Only this kind of development, only this kind of growth, marks the real evolution of man.
There is, and there can be, no other kind of evolution whatever.

Imagine that we are sitting here talking of religions and that the maid Masha hears our conversation. She, of course, understands it in her own way and she repeats what she has understood to the porter Ivan. The porter Ivan again understands it in his own way and he repeats what he has understood to the coachman Peter next door. The coachman Peter goes to the country and recounts in the village what the gentry talk about in town. Do you think that what he recounts will at all resemble what we said? This is precisely the relation between existing religions and that which was their basis. You get teachings, traditions, prayers, rites, not at fifth but at twenty-fifth hand, and, of course, almost everything has been distorted beyond recognition and everything essential forgotten long ago.