When the Russian mathematician Ouspensky, was first studying with Gurdjieff, he had great trouble understanding Gurdjieff's insistence that most people are machines and totally unaware of the objective world around them. Then, one day, after World War I had begun, Ouspensky saw a truck full of artificial legs. Thes artificial legs were being sent to the front-line hospitals, for soldiers whose legs had not even blown off, but whose legs would be blown off. The prediction that these legs would be blown off was so certain that the artificial legs were already on their way to replace the natural legs. The prediction was based on the mathematical certainty that millions of young men would march to the front, to be maimed and murdered, as mindlessly as cattle marching into a slaughterhouse.

In a flash, Ouspensky understood the mechanical nature of ordinary human consciousness.