A closer look
Russian mystic George Gurdjieff forced the wealthy European followers of his esoteric Fourth Way philosophy to participate in a bizarre psychological practice he called the stop exercise. Whenever he shouted the command, no matter the time of day or the situation, every student in the vicinity was required to instantly freeze all of their physical movements and hold their awkward poses like human statues. If someone was in the middle of chewing food, balancing on a ladder, or crossing a busy street, they were expected to remain completely paralyzed until Gurdjieff eventually remembered to tell them to snap out of it. He claimed this was a necessary spiritual technique designed to wake them up from the mechanical sleepwalking of daily life and build total conscious awareness. In reality, he essentially convinced a group of rich, highly educated bohemian intellectuals to play an incredibly stressful, high-stakes game of Simon Says while he sat back and presumably laughed at how ridiculous they all looked
