6: An early warning

Not too long after joining, a fellow student told me that one senior student in the early days of the school had given up her children in order to be with the Teacher. This struck me at the time as utterly incomprehensible.

This was told to me in the context of explaining how students at the beginning had to put up with far greater difficulties than we had to, in order to create the school. They had to live in very rudimentary conditions in order to establish the property at Renaissance (Apollo), for example. We who came later were the beneficiaries of their efforts, their payment for us.

I knew no details. I did not know whether Robert Burton had asked her to give up her children or whether he knew anything about it. She was not in the London Centre, and when I met her much later in my time in the school, it never seemed like an appropriate question to ask. There was no place for children in the early days of the school.

This alone should have been a warning to me. But I compartmentalised it as something I had no first-hand knowledge of. I was doing what the fourth way system itself calls ‘buffering’: the holding of incompatible beliefs simultaneously: not as possibilities without prejudice, but as beliefs sealed off from one another. This is sometimes referred to in non-esoteric circles as cognitive dissonance, in which the belief causing discomfort is ignored.

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3.2: Influence C in the Fellowship

When I joined the Fellowship I never questioned its authenticity as a fourth way school. I simply accepted the rules, did the exercises and enjoyed the sense of being on a meaningful journey. I felt I was able to verify the teacher through the people around me and the teaching itself. At no point did the question of lineage arise as a problem for me. Once I was asked about it in a prospective student meeting and replied that the System came to our teacher through Rodney Collin and Alex Horn, Robert Burton’s teacher. After the meeting another student quite rightly said to me that we shouldn’t claim a connection with Rodney Collin because we don’t know this for certain. Lineage was always claimed by Robert Burton through Alex Horn, but it is not at all clear what connection Horn had with the fourth way of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. There is a suggestion that Horn visited Collin in Mexico, but there is scant evidence that he stayed for any length of time or learned anything from him. Howeve

3.7: Centres of gravity and body types

You’re nothing but a pack of cards! —Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland I do not recall reading anywhere in Gurdjieff’s or Ouspensky’s works the idea of body types or centres of gravity. The idea of body types appears to derive from Rodney Collin’s Theory of Celestial Influence and that of centres of gravity is, as far as I can tell, an innovation by Robert Burton, although I do not know for certain. In essence both sets of ideas are peripheral to the aim of the fourth way, but they have their uses. Both sets of ideas provide a framework in which one can identify the mechanics of one’s ‘machine.’ This enables one better to understand one’s mechanical or automatic reactions to people and situations and thus become more forgiving and accepting of oneself and others. The idea of centres of gravity appears to be an embellishment on the division of the body into head, heart and guts, or intellectual centre, emotional centre and instinctive-moving centre, which is discussed in In Search

3.3: The Fourth Way to what?

If I were to formulate from today’s understanding what my aim was when I first joined SES at the age of seventeen, it would be to acquire a sense of peace and that clear state of awareness that went with it, and also the delight of understanding the world from a set of ideas that made it make sense. It is hard to accept that sometimes it doesn’t. Stepping back, what is the aim of the fourth way from the point of view of its basic texts? The most fundamental texts are arguably Ouspensky’s The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution and his In Search of the Miraculous , also Gurdjieff’s All and Everything . Life is only real then, when I am starts with a summary of the intended results of Gurdjieff’s All and Everything , of which Life is the third series. The summary is as follows: FIRST SERIES: To destroy, mercilessly, without any compromises whatsoever, in the mentation and feelings of the reader, the beliefs and views, by centuries rooted in him, about everything existing in the

The fourth way to nowhere

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