The fourth way to nowhere

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 peopl

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 compartmenta

Some nineteen years later I was working on a painting project that required great accuracy. I was painting a straight line. Suddenly, for reasons that are not clear and without looking up, I became aware of my surroundings other than just the paintbrush, and there seemed to be more light, although nothing in my surroundings had changed (I was actually in the garage). I put my attention on the point where the working surfaces met, as taught in the SES, and the line proceeded straight. A thought intruded, the feeling of presence was lost, and the line wavered also. Although this only lasted a few seconds, the thought then came, ‘I must find people who know about this,’ and that if necessary I would return to the SES and start all over again. That is how I found the School. I had an old bookmark for ‘Gurdjieff-Ouspensky Centres’ in one of my books. I remember phoning all the numbers on it—some were dead, some had been reallocated. One of the last ones I tried was a number in California an

When I was thirteen years old I formed in my mind and heart the very definite intention to find out the meaning of life. That was how I expressed it to myself then. I remember exactly where I was at the time, at the top of the school playing fields during a break. The possibility that it has no meaning other than what we give it had not occurred to me, or if I had come across such an idea, I dismissed it. Some years later I remember a teacher at university pouring scorn on the idea of wanting to know the meaning of life, regarding it as simply a naïve phase of youth that people grow out of. For my part I regarded that attitude in turn as simply the ignorant fossilisation of old age. Maybe it was because my life had been quite painful at times and I felt there must be something better, but it was at a time in my life when for me things were actually going quite well. The most miserable year of my life was when I was ten years old, and this was not noticed by my parents, however they had

Link to part 1: The arousing of thought Link to part 2: Cult versus belief Alice laughed. “There's no use trying,” she said: “one can't believe impossible things.”  “I daresay you haven't had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” How did I come to believe so many doubtful and even unprovable things?  Forty-four invisible conscious beings—angels—watching over our School and its students. They signal to us in co-incidences, messages on billboards and car licence plates (the interpretation of which is largely by the Teacher, although sometimes by us in imitation of him). Past conscious beings have encoded the secrets of awakening not only in scriptures but in the bridge in the background of the Mona Lisa, in the square trouser leg of Diego Rivera’s self-portrait, and in potsherds and wall-paintings from Neolithic times. The spiri