The Fourth Way (essays on Gurdjieff) P D Ouspensky Introduction The following essays assume a knowledge of the material presented by P. D. Ouspensky in a series of ten lectures he or his students would give to people interested in hearing about the work that they were engaged in. Today, those lectures are available in two books: The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution and The Cosmology of Man's Possible Evolution. The context in which Ouspensky acquired the source of this material from G. I. Gurdjieff, as well as much of the same material, is described in Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous. Without some familiarity (and in some cases a lot of familiarity) with the ideas as expounded in these books, the following may not make much sense. The essays listed below are divided into two groups: psychological and cosmological. The cosmological ideas of the fourth way are closely bound with the psychological practices—this is not an armchair philosophy but an active way of life. The psychological and cosmological teachings go hand-in-hand, as "one hand washes the other", and simply reading or talking about the fourth way is to miss it. "Speaking generally, you will never understand what I wish to convey if you merely listen." G. I. Gurdjieff In addition, there are several essays I've combined into a group called "Miscellaneous". These last essays seem to me to contain a roughly equal combination of psychological and cosmological material, and so really belong with neither of the previous two groupings. But it is all somewhat academic—the fourth way is a whole, and every part relates and connects to every other part, and any approach must lead to all other approaches or it is simply not the fourth way. Enter from any angle you like, but be aware of other angles, and watch for connections. (For now, I am just appending any new essays to the Miscellaneous section, regardless of content.) The scientific information contained in these essays is generally accepted and can be found on the web or in popular modern books. What is different here and not contained in those sources, is the organization or ordering of the information. In particular, the structure applied here is based on my understanding of the fourth way. It may seem strange to see fourth way ideas expressed in terms of modern scientific thought, but much of the fourth way cosmology is supported by modern science (albeit unwittingly). It would appear, to one who values the fourth way above modern science, to give modern science a certain validity, especially in that area of modern endeavor known as quantum physics. In a similar way, we can find correspondences between modern psychological and neurological discoveries and fourth way ideas, but again the interpretation of the information, its meaning, is understood differently. I am writing this and publishing it here because I think it is a useful example of how the fourth way can lead us into a more active and personal relationship with the world in which we find ourselves. We now find an announcement of some new scientific discovery intriguing, know what relates or might relate to it, "where it belongs" so to speak, and how it might add to our understanding in many different areas. We read a myth and suddenly gain an insight into something the inventors were trying to tell us. The fourth way enables us to integrate knowledge with life and so forge a path of ever-increasing understanding and wonder. "After some time one comes to a position where nothing is independent of the work, where there are very few actions that are not connected with the work." P. D. Ouspensky, A Further Record The Praxis of Consciousness The knowledge that consciousness varies and that we can learn to control that variation is the key to understanding a practice and theory of consciousness. This practice is based on the simple effort to be aware of ourselves in our surroundings. An already existing theory of consciousness becomes recognizable as a result of the practice, and serves as a map to direct further practice. Introduction We experience the variation of our personal level of consciousness at least daily. We can see it, for example, when we wake up in the morning. We come out of a dream state and progressively realize we are in bed, then that it is morning, it is Saturday morning and so on. It is something we are intimately familiar with, but before meeting with this set of ideas, ascribe no particular importance to it. We can take some of those remembrances of passive awareness, and apply some effort to explore them. If you want a challenge, try to be aware of your facial muscles as you remove your blankets in the morning. We may effect a change in our awareness by trying to become more aware, to observe, for example, that as we write or talk our shoulders have a certain tension, our posture assumes a certain attitude, we are feeling uneasy or glad, nervous or comfortable. By increasingly adding subjects to our awareness we can become aware of considerably more at once than we were aware of only moments before. By recognizing the fact of such variations in our awareness we come to what is perhaps the first tentative theory—consciousness appears to be a continuum. That is, the ranges of consciousness we perceive seem to fit nicely into a continuum, stretching from an unconscious deep sleep to ever more lucid and inclusive awareness. How far this goes, how much we can be conscious of, is hard to say (if indeed there is any limit). We may have had experiences of a quality of awareness that seems far removed from our relatively meager attempts to increase awareness, but at least it can be said that such higher states of consciousness don't rule out the possibility that they are on the same continuum, and it is possible that those higher states can in some way be reached intentionally—if we can continue to increase our successful efforts to be ever more aware. In any case, unless we actually reach a point at which we are unable to increase our awareness by further personal efforts, it seems desirable to continue to make efforts to increase consciousness as long as the efforts are fruitful. The Practice of Consciousness The practice of consciousness can be performed by making efforts to be aware of ourselves in any and all situations. If we set out conscientiously to be aware of ourselves continually throughout the day, we first discover that we cannot do it. We get distracted constantly and, if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that we spend our day more distracted than aware. This general distraction may be seen as a sort of pinpoint awareness; we are aware of one thing and then a different thing and so on, but rarely do we experience ourselves as existing simultaneously with the object of our attention. This realization of the difficulty in attaining any degree of increased awareness is a first fruit of efforts to increase consciousness. So, in fact, the practice of awareness at once produces results. The chief difficulty, perhaps, is accepting what we observe and starting with that, not trying to force observations to fit pre- conceived ideas of what we might or should experience. It seems paradoxical, or even disheartening, to attain some result such as the observation 'my mind wanders' rather than something like 'I feel a peace pervading my being', but it is essential to build with clear, simple observations that suggest practical next steps rather than hope-filled dead-ends. If we observe that our mind wanders and that this causes us to forget about trying to be aware of ourselves in our surroundings, we can make experiments specifically on this condition and see what diminishes it, and what aggravates it. Here too it is important to keep things simple and practical. We may find, for example, that we don't do well with the music blaring or the TV on, while we have better luck when walking down Main Street or weeding the garden. We may not do so well when lying in bed or drinking beer in the easy chair but better sitting in a hard chair or in an unaccustomed position. Or vice-versa. There is no end to the small experiments we can make and, in time, these experiments may produce a nucleus of tools we can use to keep our mind from wandering the way it did when we first set out to control awareness. But perhaps it is not a wandering mind we face when trying to increase our awareness but something else, say strong dissatisfaction with our life, our job, our mate. These too are practical, useful observations. As in the example of a wandering mind, creative experimentation can lead to a collection of practical techniques to help in profiting by this. But first, the feeling itself must be addressed. It hardly serves our goal to become more aware if we simply find ways to suppress feelings which appear to be obstacles. It is necessary to evaluate the feeling, to pursue it with the awareness of ourselves pursuing it. That awareness of ourselves keeps this pursuit from becoming just another distraction and even makes it a part of our general effort to increase awareness. That is, there is no restriction as to what we may try to include in the range of our awareness: feelings, thoughts, muscular tensions, sunlight, wind, a ticking clock, are all fair game.