The Fourth Way
About This Book
The Fourth Way is P.D. Ouspensky's most comprehensive presentation of Gurdjieff's teaching in his own words — drawn from transcripts of talks and extensive question-and-answer sessions he held with students in London and New York between 1921 and 1946, after his formal separation from Gurdjieff. Where In Search of the Miraculous presents the teaching primarily through the narrative of Ouspensky's encounter with Gurdjieff, The Fourth Way offers a more systematic and encyclopedic treatment of the complete system: the centres, the laws, the cosmology, the work on self, the nature of influence from higher sources, and the specific demands the path makes on those who undertake it.
The question-and-answer format is particularly valuable: Ouspensky's students asked the practical, difficult, often confused questions that any serious student brings to this material, and Ouspensky's responses reveal the working of a highly precise mind that genuinely understood the teaching at a deep level. The full range of the Fourth Way system is covered — the food diagram, the enneagram, the Ray of Creation, the concept of hydrogens, the Law of Three and Seven, the levels of the objective universe, the work on being versus work on knowledge — making this the closest thing to a complete textbook of the system in a single volume.
What You'll Learn
• Master the three-centre model: how the intellectual, emotional, and moving/instinctive centres each have their own intelligence, their own forms of knowledge, and their characteristic misuse patterns — and why genuine development requires the simultaneous education of all three rather than the overdevelopment of the intellectual at the expense of the others
• Understand the concept of 'being' as distinct from 'knowledge': why accumulating more information about spiritual development without a corresponding increase in the actual quality of one's consciousness produces what Ouspensky calls 'lunatics' — people who know everything and have understood nothing
• Grasp the Law of Octaves in its full application: how all processes in the universe tend to deviate from their original direction at specific intervals, why this means that conscious effort must be applied at precisely the right moments to maintain the direction of any genuine development
• Recognise the influences that determine the quality of a person's life: how A-influences (created by life and promoting sleep), B-influences (created by conscious beings to help people awaken), and C-influences (direct communication from the Work) function differently and require different qualities of attention to receive
• Learn the specific practices Ouspensky prescribes for the development of self-remembering: not a single technique but a range of approaches suited to different situations, temperaments, and levels of development — and why this work cannot be done alone
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