7: Basic ideas of the fourth way

The little essay that follows is a summary of the key elements of the fourth way. 

Shortly before I left the School, but when I had already decided to leave, I was asked by a student at Apollo to write something for the London Centre Fourth Way Facebook page. I demurred, on the ground that I had very little to say. As my time in the School went on, I felt I knew less and less. I felt that many of the contributions of others were simply repeating old and stale material, much of which we had stopped working with long ago, and the Facebook page even mentioned J. G. Bennett and others with whom the Fellowship has no connection. If the School was about anything, it was about being present to each moment, it was about simplification in which the old stuff was no longer relevant. The student persisted, and I wrote the short essay reproduced here.

My intention was to write only what I felt I had verified. I wanted to emphasise the requirement of verification as a piece of clear advice to people who might join. 

I also wanted to underline the concept of good householder, since I felt that in distancing themselves from their ‘life’ friends and ‘life’ family, students were in fact not in ‘good householder’ emotionally, and were also overlooking the fact that what distinguishes the fourth way from the other ways is that it takes place in ordinary life.

A life-long friend, not in the School, warned that this essay might on the contrary lull interested people into a false sense of security regarding the Fellowship. This was certainly a risk, however I felt it better stated than not. Perhaps it would also be a message for any existing students who had swapped verification for blind belief and might heed a wake-up call. In any event this little essay is now buried beneath other posts, as happens to things on social media.

What is the fourth way?

Key ideas: the fourth way takes place in life—good householder—self-remembering—the non-expression of negative emotions—verification as a continuous process.

The fourth way is so called because it is not one of three other ways, the way of the monk, the yogi and the fakir. The other three ways require distancing oneself in one way or another from everyday life, whereas the fourth way takes place in life.

According to Peter Ouspensky, the minimum requirement for starting the fourth way work is to be a good householder, which means having a well-regulated life. It implies things like paying bills on time, looking after one’s family and keeping one’s friendships in good repair, simple but important things like that.

But what is a Way for? It starts from the presupposition that our usual level of consciousness is a kind of waking dream, and that it is possible to achieve higher, or one might say, clearer states of consciousness. The fourth way also provides practical tools to achieve this. Exercises which get in the way of our mechanical responses allow us to observe the habits and misunderstandings that obstruct clear consciousness. 

The exercise of self-remembering, which is at the heart of the fourth way, is the effort to be aware of oneself at the same time as what one is looking at or sensing. This practice seems so obvious that we tend to imagine we are doing it anyway, until we actually try to do it. Then it becomes clear that most of the time we are identified with the thought or sensation of the moment, or some matter to do with the past or future. One’s self is not in the picture, not in the now.

The effort of self-remembering if repeated often enough eventually strengthens in us, and we can learn to be present more often. We may become clearer that we are not that thought or feeling or object with which we are identified. This state is very simple, even ordinary, and at the same time opens the question, who am I?

The second major exercise is the non-expression of negative emotions. From the point of view of ordinary psychology this presents a difficulty, because there appear to be only two alternatives: express frustration, anger and so on, or suppress it, and sometimes suppression can lead to pathological states. Suppressing anger, for example, can lead to depression, as anger is turned inwards on oneself as blame. A third way exists, however, which is to acknowledge the emotion in oneself without expressing it and without suppressing it either. This is a form of voluntary suffering. To succeed we have to be in a more objective state, that is, not identified. It is like saying to oneself, ‘this too shall pass.’ In this way we retain self-control and we retain the energy which would have been wasted had we ‘let it all out.’ This is very difficult and we can expect to fail more often than we succeed. The usefulness of this exercise, as with self-remembering, can only truly be verified by doing it.

The System as presented by George Gurdjieff, Peter Ouspensky and Rodney Collin comes with a great deal of other material, some of which may seem bizarre or at any rate not recognisable in terms of modern scientific understanding. However the fourth way also makes the request neither to believe nor to disbelieve any of the ideas presented. This is because, on the one hand the fourth way is intended to be a practical system rather than a belief system, and on the other hand in order to learn something new one must be prepared at least to entertain new ideas. It is important not to believe what one has not verified, but simply to hold these things in the mind as possibly true, possibly false, and possibly not correctly understood. A theory is not real until we have verified it.

If we believe too readily, the ideas themselves can become a kind of sleep. In the end only practice and personal verification count. Because of our human tendency to self-deception, verification has to be a continuous process, just as the effort to be present is.